Lesson no 6 = Creating A Powerpoint Background

Creating A Powerpoint Background

For the background to your PowerPoint presentation, you can specify the following:

• A solid fill
• A gradient fill
• A picture or texture fill
• A Pattern fill

To change your presentation background, click Design > Background > Background Styles > Format Background. Alternatively, you can right click on a free area on a slide (and area that doesn't contain an object) and then select Format Background from there.

You should now see the Format Background window.

Ensure that the fill tab is selected (as in the image above) and then make changes according to what kind of background you want for your presentation.

Solid Fill

To specify a solid fill colour, ensure that the appropriate radio button is selected and then click on the Fill Colour swatch. A panel is displayed for you to select a colour.

The colours in the main part of the grid are all theme colours, so if you select one, you can be pretty confident that the background will blend in well with the rest of the presentation's colours. At the bottom of the colour selection panel are standard colours and if you want even more colours to choose from, you can click More Colours at the bottom.

Gradient Fill

A gradient is the smooth transition of one colour into another.

When this option is selected, you can choose from a selection of ready made gradients by clicking on the Preset colours button. Alternatively, you can exercise more control by defining the gradient yourself. If you do this, you will need to tell PowerPoint whether the gradient is linear, radial, rectangular, path or shade from title. Additionally you will need to specify the gradient direction, angle, where the colours are positioned on the gradient (with the Gradient stops) and the properties of each colour in the gradient. These properties include what the colour is, how bright its is and also how transparent.

Picture Or Texture Fill

When specifying a picture or texture fill for your PowerPoint background, you are actually using a picture as the background.

PowerPoint comes with some built in textures you can use, or you can select an image that is stored on your hard drive. When you select an image in this way, you can choose to have the image appearing just once in the background, or to have it repeating like a texture. As you can see from the screenshot, there are many other attributes you can set that control the picture's appearance.

Pattern Fill

As with textures, PowerPoint ships with a selection of pre-made patterns that you can use as your background.

Patterns available for selection include dots, stripes, zig zags, brickwork and many more. You can specify whatever foreground and background colours you want to use.

Resetting The PowerPoint Background

If you decide to reset your background, but you've made so many changes that it would take too long to reverse each one, you can use the Reset Background button at the bottom of the Format Background window. You can also tell PowerPoint to apply the background you just designed to all slides in the presentation - using the Apply to All button. If you don't apply the background to all slides, then only the currently selected slide is affected.