Flexible, easy to use—and even fun—PowerPoint is a dynamic and practical application that can help you improve your presentations by enhancing them with visual elements, so your audience better understands and engages with the information you are providing. With templates and tools that range from the simple to the sophisticated, you can easily create images, animations, charts, maps, graphs, and more without needing expensive design programs or graphics tools.

The Great Courses has partnered with ITProTV to bring you 33 lessons that will introduce you to both the fundamentals and some of the lesser-known tricks to making phenomenal presentations using PowerPoint. In addition to being introduced to the PowerPoint environment, you’ll learn tips on how to add slides to a presentation, insert text and images, and CREATE TABLE IF NOT EXISTSs and charts. From there, you’ll learn how to enhance a presentation with design themes, animations, and transitions. And, you’ll get valuable tips for preparing and delivering a robust presentation. While this series uses the Windows operating system with PowerPoint 2016 locally installed, you’ll find the interface and tools within many versions of PowerPoint remain the same or similar enough that you can easily navigate different applications.

University of Florida faculty member Vonne Smith started her teaching career with a global IT training company, teaching Microsoft® Office and Adobe® Creative Suite applications more than 15 years ago. She knows PowerPoint inside and out, including the elements that most commonly frustrate users. Accompanied by her co-hosts Aubri Spurgin and Wes Bryan, she will take you through adding text and tables, inserting images and icons—even creating or adding 3-D models.

Professional, Practical, Personable, and Powerful

Much like defining yourself as a “cat person” or “dog person,” many Microsoft Office users consider themselves “Excel people” or “PowerPoint people.” Those who find joy in creating pivot tables and inserting automated mathematical formulas into Excel cells may dismiss PowerPoint as being a creative program for clip art and star-wipe animations that prioritizes appearance over logical functions. Yet, PowerPoint is packed with practical uses—including highly developed tools for charts, graphs, and tables.

Consider the chart. Professional-looking charts are fairly easy to create and manipulate in Excel. Many Excel users probably would not consider turning to PowerPoint for chart creation. Yet, with a number of preformatted and templated chart options—some quite stunning—you’ll find it’s simple to translate complex data into easy-to-understand visuals and go beyond the standard limitations of Excel by personalizing the visuals with colors, fonts, and images.