How Difficult is it to Learn PowerPoint?

Are you curious about learning PowerPoint but worried it might be too hard? Of course, the difficulty that comes with learning a new skill is somewhat subjective. The challenges of learning PowerPoint depend on the kinds of presentations a student hopes to complete. However, it is a relatively approachable skill that users can become proficient in without much difficulty. 

No matter your current schedule or comfort level with PowerPoint, plenty of tools are available to help make learning easier than you might think.

What is PowerPoint?

Microsoft PowerPoint is the most commonly used presentation software across almost all professional industries. PowerPoint is one of the most important parts of Microsoft’s Office 365 programs, alongside Word and Excel. PowerPoint lets users easily create vibrant and memorable presentations that quickly communicate meaning in a professional setting. Users can add animations, transitions, graphics, and other imagery to their slides, ensuring they produce both communicative and impressive presentations for their audience.

PowerPoint is a slideshow editing tool built to give users the tools they need to organize information, communicate effectively, and produce presentations to deliver through live address or without a presenter. PowerPoint makes the job easier and more efficient, whether you manage important information in advance of a meeting, prepare a sales pitch to a potential client, or compile important workplace policies and procedures in a single place. This versatility has made PowerPoint an industry-standard tool in almost all professional contexts.

Read more about what PowerPoint is and why you should learn it.

What Can You Do with PowerPoint?

PowerPoint allows users to create vibrant and memorable visual presentations that can serve a wide variety of purposes. PowerPoint’s advanced features let users integrate dynamic animations and 3D modeled graphics into their designs, allowing them to create more complex presentations than simple text projected onto a screen. Whether you are attempting to keep an audience engaged during a critical seminar or make a sales pitch as memorable as possible, PowerPoint gives you the tools to wow your audience.

Some users will use PowerPoint to create informative slideshows that condense complicated information into a single, easy-to-digest presentation. This makes the program ideal for both instructors and professionals looking to host informational seminars regularly. In fact, many online classes you take will use PowerPoint to provide students with the main takeaways from a lecture. Some users, who need to persuade audiences, such as entrepreneurs meeting with potential investors, will use PowerPoint to create memorable and persuasive presentations that convince their audience to invest in their product.

What Are the Most Challenging Parts of Learning PowerPoint?

The most difficult part of learning PowerPoint is learning how to use the program’s more advanced design features, such as its layering and animation tools. Students who want to customize their PowerPoint presentation beyond the simple options built into the program’s design wizard will need advanced design and composition training.

How Does Learning PowerPoint Compare to Other Applications/Languages/Fields?

The most comparable alternatives to PowerPoint are its largest market competitors, Google Slides and Prezi. Both of these are free presentation design applications with significant browser-based functionalities. Having been developed well after PowerPoint established its stranglehold on the presentation design application market, these programs exist primarily as responses to PowerPoint, attempting to include features that PowerPoint lacks.

The most prominent advantage to these programs is that they are either free or have fully-functional free versions. Prezi has a free version available to users who only plan to produce basic presentations, and Google Slides is free to any user with a Google account. This makes them ideal tools for presenters who don’t feel the need to purchase a monthly Office subscription to continue their work. In addition, since these programs aren’t coming directly from Microsoft, many Mac users find that they are easier to use on their devices.

The drawback to either of these programs is that even though they are competitors to PowerPoint, Microsoft still boasts a nearly 95% market share across many professional industries, mostly because of PowerPoint's Office 365 integration. Any company using Word or Excel will be using PowerPoint alongside those programs. This means there is no choice but PowerPoint for students looking to learn a presentation application to use in their daily professional lives.

Design and Composition Training

For many users, the challenge in learning PowerPoint won’t come from difficulties learning the tools but from learning how to use those tools to make evocative and persuasive presentations. Students with prior experience in visual design will have an easier time learning these skills. Students without this background who still want to learn PowerPoint design should consider enrolling in Noble’s PowerPoint Presentation Design course.

Learn PowerPoint with Hands-on Training at Noble Desktop

Professionals looking to learn PowerPoint may consider skills development training through Noble Desktop. These courses, available in person at Noble’s Manhattan campus and through live online instruction, will give students hands-on training in designing and organizing information using PowerPoint. These courses, which expert instructors teach, will provide students with the experience needed to build evocative and memorable presentations. Even in online courses, class sizes are kept small, so students can interface directly with their instructor to receive assistance and feedback. Plus, Noble offers free retakes on all its courses, giving students more opportunities to practice building presentations in a professional environment.

Noble offers a PowerPoint Bootcamp, which teaches students, even those without prior PowerPoint experience, how to design compelling and evocative presentations. In this certificate-granting program, students will learn how to work with PowerPoint layouts, add animations and graphics, and work with layers, charts, graphs, and other objects. Then, students will receive advanced skills training, such as creating reusable PowerPoint templates, utilizing multimedia features in a presentation, and recording a presentation for later use. These skills will take students from novices to PowerPoint experts and prepare them to use the program professionally.

Since PowerPoint is a design program, Noble also offers students a PowerPoint Presentation Design course. This class focuses on the rhetorical and theoretical side of communicating through PowerPoint. In this class, students will learn design principles related to color, typography, graphic images, and other visual design elements. Whereas a bootcamp course teaches students how to use the tool to build presentations, this course will teach students how to design them, giving them the composition and design theories they need to make their presentations memorable and effective.