Creating a Template with the AutoContent Wizard

The quickest way to create a presentation, especially for new users and users in a hurry, is to use the AutoContent Wizard. The AutoContent Wizard asks a series of questions about the purpose of your presentation, what you want to communicate, and by what means you will present it. On the basis of the answers you give, it chooses a design for the slides and provides generic headings and text.

Follow these steps to create a PowerPoint presentation with the AutoContent Wizard:

1.      From the PowerPoint dialog box (see Figure 17-1), click the AutoContent Wizard option button, if necessary, and then click OK. You see the following dialog box. In the course of choosing a presentation with the AutoContent Wizard, you will be asked questions about the presentation type, presentation style, and presentation options.

TIP: If the PowerPoint dialog box isn't onscreen, you can still create a presentation with the AutoContent Wizard by choosing File | New, clicking the General tab in the New Presentation dialog box, and double-clicking the AutoContent Wizard icon.

2.      Click the Next button. The next dialog box asks what kind of presentation you want to give. The presentations are organized by category. To begin with, the box on the right shows the presentations available in the General category. Click any of the other category name buttons to display the presentations available in that category.

3.      Click a category name button that best describes the type of presentation you want to create, and, in the box on the right, click the type of presentation you want to create.

4.      Click the Next button.

The next dialog box asks what type of output you will use for your presentation. As you can see in Figure 17-2, you have five options.

5.      Click the option button next to the type of output you want, and then click the Next button.

6.      The next dialog box asks for a title for the presentation and what you want to include on each slide. By default, PowerPoint includes the date the slide was last updated and the slide number. If you don’t want your slides to include this information, uncheck these boxes. If you want to include a footer in your slides (information that will appear at the bottom of each slide), type that text in the Footer box. When you’re done, click Next.

7.      Click Finish to display the first slide that you and the AutoContent Wizard have just created.

8.      Choose File | Save or click the Save button to save the new presentation.

Figure 17-3 shows the new presentation in Normal view. You can also display the presentation in four other views, and we’ll look at all of them in detail in the section “Ways of Viewing and Working on Slides.” To add content to your presentation slide by slide, click on a topic on the left to display that slide, and then enter your information in the slide on the right.