- [Speaker] Hello everyone, in this video I'll be showing
you how to build a basic consulting style slide
in 60 seconds or less.
I'll first build the slide in real time
then I'll go through the video piece by piece
to give a breakdown of exactly what I did at each step.
Throughout the video I'll be referencing
different keyboard shortcuts from our list
of the top 50 PowerPoint shortcuts for consultants.
You can get your own free copy of this list
by going to TheAnalystAcademy.com
or just click on the link in the description below.
(upbeat music)
All right, here we go.
As I'm going through this there's a few things
I wanna call out.
The first thing is that I'm gonna rely very heavily
on my keyboard shortcuts but I'm not gonna eliminate
my mouse completely.
I'll use the two in combination to maximize my speed
and efficiency.
Another thing you might notice is how intentional I'm being
with how I build this slide.
I wanna add these objects in a certain order,
that way I can minimize the amount of reformatting
I have to do which is gonna save me time
and headache later on.
The next thing you'll notice is that I'm reusing objects
on the slide as much as possible.
Most shapes on a slide are pretty similar so duplicating
and reformatting them can be faster
than adding a new shape altogether.
And then lastly notice the formatting.
I need to make sure each of these objects is aligned
and distributed perfectly.
And I can do that really easily by relying on my shortcuts.
The end result is a well formatted slide with even spacing
and distribution all around,
which is a hallmark for any consulting style slide.
And there you go one minute
to build a basic consulting slide.
Of course not all your slides are gonna look like this
but you can see how effectively using shortcuts
allowed me to dramatically reduce the time
it took to build this slide.
What could have taken me five, 10 minutes
or maybe even longer took just over a minute.
And if the side was even more complex the time-savings
would be even greater.
All right, now let's break this down piece by piece.
So the first thing I did was just add a box by going
into insert then shapes and selecting the rectangle here.
I would usually have this command in my quick access toolbar
in my QAT to save me some extra clicks but,
in this video I haven't customized it yet
so for now I'll just have to go to the ribbon.
I'm gonna use this box as the starting point
for almost all the other shapes on the slide
but before I duplicate it I wanna add text.
And I'm doing this because I don't wanna duplicate the boxes
and then have to go through
and manually add text to each one.
Fortunately this has already formatted how I want
so I'm ready to duplicate it.
I'll duplicate it by using two shortcuts,
control mouse click and shift mouse click.
So I'll just hold both control and shift while I click
with my mouse and drag this over,
and that will allow me to quickly copy the box
while keeping it aligned with the original box.
Then with this next box I need to turn it into bullet points
and make other formatting changes.
So this is where my ribbon shortcuts come in handy.
So if you hit the alt key then I can choose
which command I wanna use.
I'll need to change the shape fill, the shape outline
and the text color.
And this looks like I'm moving really fast
and doing some complicated commands
but really I'm just opening up different commands
in the ribbon, and most of them are very intuitive.
So for example, to change the outline of the shape
I can access the home tab by pushing alt H then S O
for shape outline.
Then finally I'll hit N for no outline.
Then lastly, I'll just hit control L to align this text
to the left-hand side of the box.
Then I'll copy this over again holding control and shift.
And now I'm ready to copy these down.
Again notice how the order in which I built
these is important.
Now I can copy these down the slide
without having to make further adjustments.
I'll select these all and use control and shift
to copy these down but then this time
for the bottom two rows, I'll hit the f4 key.
Which will repeat whatever command I just executed
so in this case it's gonna continue to copy these boxes down
but it's going to perfectly space these boxes automatically.
All right, I've got the meet of my slide there
now I just need to add some subtitles and lines
and I'm done.
But before I make my subtitle boxes I'll copy the formatting
of this title box since I want my subtitles to look similar
and I can do that by hitting control shift C
to copy the formatting.
Then I'll add title here for good measure,
then again I'll use what's already on the slide
to make the boxes that I need.
So, I'll drag these up since they're already aligned
then while they're selected I can now paste the formatting
I just copied from my title box.
And I can do that by hitting control shift V.
Then I'll use another shortcut to decrease the font
a couple sizes, control shift angle bracket
and now they're formatted exactly how I want
in just a couple steps.
Then it's just a matter of putting the right text in each
and what's gonna help me as I do
this is a few really useful shortcuts.
The escape key to exit the shape,
the enter key to highlight the text inside of the shape
and the tab key to move from one shape to the next.
The last step for this slide is to add lines
and I don't have these in my quick access toolbar
so I'll have to go to the insert tab to put them in.
But as I put them in I'll hold shift to make sure
it stays completely flat.
Then I'll duplicate them down the slide.
I can then hold the control key
to select multiple objects at once,
then again use my ribbon shortcuts to format them quickly.
Then the very last thing is I want to distribute these
so I'll select these boxes, then open up my distribute menu
by hitting alt H G A then V for vertical alignment.
And now they are all evenly distributed on the slide.
And there you have it a quick and easy way
to build a simple consulting style slide.
If you found this video useful
be sure to visit us at TheAnalystAcademy.com
for lots of really great downloads, articles
and courses such as our most popular course,
Advanced PowerPoint for Consultants where thousands
of students all around the world have learned
to use PowerPoint to save time, work efficiently
and build beautiful consulting style slides.
So check us out at TheanAlystAcademy.com.
(upbeat music)