PowerPoint in Business: What Slides Are For

Microsoft PowerPoint is one of the most widely used tools for business presentations. Teams use it for monthly reviews, project updates, training sessions, proposals to management and briefings for visitors. Many people learn it by copying what colleagues do. The result is often a deck that is full of text, uses five different fonts and is hard to change.

This course teaches PowerPoint as a business tool. You will learn to plan a clear storyline, design slides that people can read, use masters and templates so a deck stays consistent, show numbers with tables and charts, and use the tools that help you deliver and share a presentation.

It is written for beginners: office staff, team leaders, engineers, analysts and anyone who must prepare slides as part of the job. You do not need any earlier PowerPoint experience.

What this course does not cover

Speaking skills such as voice, body language, nerves and handling questions are covered in the course Communication and Influence for Leaders. Sales presentations are covered in Value Propositions and Solution Presentation. The theory of choosing and reading charts is covered in Data Analysis and Visualisation. This course touches those subjects only where they change how you build the slides.

Example. A planning engineer at a logistics company is asked to present the weekly delivery figures to the operations manager. She has the data and knows the subject. What she needs is a quick way to turn the data into three clear slides that look like the company template. That is the skill this course builds.