This is a powerful program that, as many of you know, is integrated into the popular productivity suite of redmond, Office. This comes to us composed of several important programs such as word, Excel, or the aforementioned PowerPoint. The latter, as we mentioned, focuses on the development and design of multimedia presentations. These are elements that we have been using for many years, either for study purposes, or at a more professional level.
But of course, as the years have gone by, the complexity of these programs has also gradually increased. By this we mean that in these times we can already add elements unimaginable just a few years ago. Therefore, when designing your own presentation, we can include videosgraphics, images, animations, etc. In addition, the download and use of PowerPoint templates is also very widespread, since they save us a lot of time and therefore effort.
But of course, at the same time the program itself presents us with a series of functions that make design tasks much easier for us as such. In this way we can obtain much more apparent results, which is one of the objectives here, with less effort. This is the case that we are going to talk about in these lines, since we are going to show you the best way to work with the backgrounds of the slides that we create.
The importance of presentation design
This is a program that, as most of you already know, focuses on multimedia presentations that we design based on slideshow. These are the ones that we offer to all those who are going to see our project, and with which we are going to try to get their attention. For this we use all kinds of additional elements to the text as such. We are talking about photos of all kinds, videos, tables, graphs, etc.
But of course, in addition to the content that we are talking about, it is also important here to use a homogeneous and clear design. It can be striking, but with a certain taste, for example, in the background of the slides, which is what interests us in this case. We must use a background discreet and that does not clash with the rest of the contents. In addition, we must take into account that we are going to use this same one, in many cases, for all the elements of this type in the same presentation. That is why being able to change this background at once, and have it take effect on all the slides, can save us a lot of money. time and efforts.
Use backgrounds in PowerPoint slides
It must be taken into account that sometimes our presentations they can be made up of a huge number of elements in the form of slides. Therefore, being able to optimize or automate your design, it will be very helpful almost always. This is the case of the background, an aspect that will coincide in many of them and that is very important in the visualization of these elements.
Thus, to change or personalize this background of the slideshowOnce we are in the Microsoft program, we go to the Design menu of the main interface. Thus, on the right side of this section, we find the option to customize these funds. All we have to do is click on Background Format, so that a new window appears on the screen to change the background of our slides.
As we can see, here we find a good number of options in this regard, all to customize this background to our liking or need. Thus, we see different types of padding that we can use, in addition to gradients adjustable, a wide range of colorslevels of transparency, etc. As is evident, we can adjust all these options based on what we want to achieve. Keep in mind that this background is very important if we want to capture the attention of the rest when making the presentation.
These are changes that we can see that are applied in real time, but they are for the active slide. If we want this background to be added to all of them, click on the Apply to all button at the bottom of the window. In this way we save having to change the background of each of the slides by hand.
When we finish editing, we will simply have to save it as a slideshow to be able to open it on any computer. Of course, first of all, we must do a preview to make sure that everything looks as it should be seen.
What problems can we have
There is no doubt that using these backgrounds in the form of images in each of the slides that are part of the presentation is a very positive point in its design. However, we must bear in mind that on certain occasions these elements can represent a negative point in the project as such. We must not forget that in many cases we are talking about a high-quality image that will be fixed as the background on each of the slides of the presentation.
In old equipment or somewhat limited in terms of hardware this could become a serious inconvenience due to the resource consumption of the project itself. The team will have to load that background image and all its content that we have designed every time we go to the next slide, which can be a performance problem.
Does the background affect the size?
Using slide backgrounds, as we’ve seen, is an important part of the design. However, we must be very careful with the backgrounds we use in presentations, as we can run into problems if we are not careful. When adding a new background, we must take into account both the color of the letters and the design they have. If we use a dark background and the letters are black or of very dark colors, it will be very difficult to see the text with quality, so before choosing one background or another (from the different options that PowerPoint makes available to us) we must analyze which one of all presents a greater contrast with the color of the text. While it’s true that we can change the color of the text, this will take extra time that we probably don’t have.
In addition to a good design, a good slideshow must be properly optimized and improved to avoid having problems with it. Therefore, whenever we add external elements it is important to make sure that they do not take up too much space. If we start uploading a lot of very large photos, and use them as a background or spread across the different pages of the presentations, what we are going to achieve is that the size of this will increase exponentially. And, the bigger the presentation, the more resources it will use on the PC and it may even happen that it freezes and we cannot play it.
The solution to this problem is to link the images to the document instead of including them inside it. In this way, what we are doing is adding a link to an image of our equipment, a link that the application will take care of searching for and displaying on the device without us having to do anything else. Of course, we must take into account that, to avoid problems with the images, we must copy each and every one of them to the same directory where the device is located, since if we change its location on our computer, the application will not be able to find them and will show a message mistake.
We must also take care of the type of background that we are going to use. A background should be a simple image, a smooth texture, or something simple. If we start adding heavily loaded backgrounds, what we are going to achieve is that the rest of the elements of the slide do not look correctly. And not only that, but the slide can also be annoying to look at. Therefore, we must think carefully about the type of funds we want to use. If, even so, we start using colorful backgrounds, it is advisable to add a slight blur to prevent the background of the slide from attracting more attention than the information that we show. Within the image options, PowerPoint allows us to add a slight blur to the images, so it will not be necessary to use third-party applications to carry out this process.
Facebook Comments
Disqus