How to Create a Power Point Presentation for a Party

Creating a Power Point presentation in itself is not easy. It takes a lot of time and good eye for graphics. It can take months to put together a Power Point presentation for an event of some sort. I began putting together Power Point presentations for my family to remember special occasions such as birthdays and graduations. Then I would burn a CD of the presentation for them to keep. You, too, can make that next special occasion even more special by putting together a Power Point presentation of their life.

Difficulty: Challenging

Instructions

Things You'll Need:

• Computer
• Microsoft PowerPoint
• Pictures

1. Take some time going through family albums and finding pictures of the person when they were young and pictures growing up and graduation pictures, and things of that sort. Sometimes it's good to ask other people if they may have pictures of the person you plan on doing the presentation on. Another part of the prep work is music. You don't have to add music to a presentation but quite often I do, and that means editing music down to about 1 minute segments for each song. I use Cool Edit Pro for my music editing, but quite often there is free trial downloads available for other programs that you could download, edit the music and then not worry about having to pay for a program.

2. Once you have the pictures ready, you need to get them on to the computer via a scanner. If any were taken with a digital camera that makes it easy, just download it to the computer. Label each picture so you know what it is and where to find it. The music should also be in a place so you know where to find it.

3. Open Microsoft PowerPoint and click to create a new presentation. Choose a background you may like. You can do a different background on each slide if you like, but I like keeping the background the same. So when I choose a background I click "Same for every slide." Then you can begin putting pictures on the slides by clicking insert picture from file. You may want to do a cover slide explaining the presentation and make sure the lay out of pictures makes sense. Each slide should have a theme (baby, growing up and graduation). The music for each slide should match the theme of the slide. Taking it one slide at a time, add the pictures you want in and the music, then left click on one of the pictures and go to "custom animation." This will allow you to make it come in and go out in a certain way. You can set it to do a wipe or a box or a diamond, anything you want. You can also set the timing on each picture so there's only one picture in at a time and have it stay on the screen for many seconds before having it exit and then the next one will come on.

4. Following each slide, set the slide transition to how many seconds or minutes that slide will stay on before going to the next one so you don't have to keep clicking the mouse. Then it will run all by itself and you can let it run on a loop without worrying about the presentation.

5. Start getting things together early. It's not easy and will take longer at the beginning until you play with it and get used to it. Play around with it and you're bound to make the presentation look good and it will be a birthday/graduation/retirement that they'll never forget!