Why Learn PowerPoint?

PowerPoint is a presentation design application used in almost all professional settings. If you need to design a presentation to communicate information or persuade an audience, you will likely use PowerPoint. Have you ever explored all of the things PowerPoint can do? PowerPoint is an incredibly versatile skill, as it is used in almost all professional settings. Learning PowerPoint will help presenters communicate more effectively and easily archive vital information to share with colleagues and subordinates. Here, you’ll learn more about the careers that benefit from PowerPoint and how it can enhance your professional life. Learning PowerPoint is a valuable and impressive skill to add to your resume, regardless of your goals. 

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.

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Common Professional Uses for PowerPoint

Despite PowerPoint being ubiquitous in the professional world, there aren’t many jobs that strictly rely on PowerPoint or use it as a primary design tool. Instead, a wide variety of professionals utilize PowerPoint in a case-by-case capacity. Teachers will use it to build presentations, HR reps will compile important information for new hires, and Business Analysts will use it to condense information for stakeholders. Knowing PowerPoint won’t be enough to get a student a job on its own, but it will be a valuable tool in almost all professional settings. Just a few common professional uses include:

Leading Important Seminars: PowerPoint helps employees who need to communicate important information to co-workers or subordinates regularly. New hires will need to periodically receive large amounts of information in a professional office setting, so learning PowerPoint is helpful for any employee. Teachers and Educators will also regularly use PowerPoint to provide their students and clients with slides highlighting the critical information given to them.

Communicating with Stakeholders: Anyone leading a design project, working with investors, or handling large amounts of data can benefit from learning PowerPoint to quickly highlight essential data that they want to communicate with stakeholders. An investment meeting may require that presenters condense hundreds of pages of business data into a few slides, or a pitch meeting might require a presenter to quickly and effectively hook their audience. The skills associated with PowerPoint will significantly help these presenters persuade and update their audiences.

Compiling Information: Not all uses of PowerPoint involve live presentations. With the ability to record presentations for later use, some professionals will use PowerPoint to collect information for audiences with whom they will never directly interact. This is especially important for asynchronous meetings and seminars, where presenters can record a PowerPoint presentation to replace a more complicated video recording. In addition, some professionals will use PowerPoint to archive and organize important information into slides to distribute to employees without ever ‘presenting’ them, such as offices organizing policies or educators providing students with contact information.

Learn a Versatile Skill

One of the advantages of learning PowerPoint is that it is a valuable tool regardless of what kind of presentations you regularly make. PowerPoint skills are not confined to a single industry, meaning that almost anyone who works in a professional or office setting will gain some advantage from learning how to use the program. Educators, Administrators, HR Reps, Managers, Project Leaders, and a host of other white-collar professionals will benefit from learning PowerPoint.

Communicate More Effectively

Learning PowerPoint can help presenters communicate more effectively, particularly those attempting to sell a product or idea. Not only will they be able to make visually compelling presentations, but they will be able to highlight important information that they can use to persuade audiences. Whether you want to undertake a sales pitch for a new product or explain an investment opportunity to stakeholders, learning PowerPoint can help you achieve your goals.

Archive Information

Sometimes, in a professional environment, large firms and organizations will use PowerPoint to provide employees and prospective employees with important information and onboarding details. Rather than using PowerPoint for live presentations, they use the program to compile information like contact info, website links, company policies, etc., to be easily referenced and shared amongst those who need this information. Learning PowerPoint can help those who are tasked with producing these informational materials.

How to Start Learning PowerPoint

Students looking to learn how to use PowerPoint have many options available. Students can opt to take a live training course, in person or online, or they can enroll in an asynchronous course. There are also free tutorials and training options available, so students should carefully consider their options to decide which method of learning PowerPoint is best for them. Noble Desktop’s Classes Near Me Tool is an ideal place to look to find and compare available PowerPoint courses.

Many students find that live instruction is the most effective way to learn skills like PowerPoint. These courses let students interact directly with live instructors who can provide feedback and answer questions. These courses are available both in-person and online, giving students additional flexibility in learning PowerPoint. In these classes, students will receive hands-on training in PowerPoint design, making the classes ideal for students hoping to quickly pick up the necessary skills to start using PowerPoint professionally. These courses require students to attend live instruction seminars, which may burden students with minimal free time. In addition, in-person classes will require students to commute to a campus or training center, whereas online instruction will likely require students to obtain PowerPoint.

Students looking for more flexibility in the pace and structure of their learning may want to consider enrolling in an on-demand course. These classes, which often consist of pre-recorded lectures and structured modules, let students control the time they spend learning new skills. This can be especially useful for students who have work or family obligations that prevent them from devoting consistent time to their studies. The drawback to these classes is that students won’t have access to a live instructor, so they won’t have someone to answer their questions or provide feedback on their designs.

A final option available to students is free training tutorials. These tutorials, most often video productions, will guide students through the basic features of PowerPoint and commonly used design principles. On their official YouTube channel, Noble Desktop provides students with a free seminar on PowerPoint Presentation Design. This lecture will help students understand fundamental visual design elements used to make memorable presentations. Noble also offers frequently updating resources on their free seminars page, so students should check in regularly to see the available options. These resources may not be enough to learn how to use PowerPoint professionally, but they are an ideal place to start.

Read the full guide on how to learn PowerPoint.

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.

Key Insights

• PowerPoint is an incredibly versatile presentation tool that is used in a wide array of professional settings.
• Learning PowerPoint will be helpful in almost all professional contexts and office settings since the program is utilized for many different functions.
• Learning to use PowerPoint can make presentations, particularly sales and investment pitches, more persuasive and effective, as they will both be visually appealing and communicate information more effectively.
• PowerPoint is also used to catalog and record information that large organizations will need to regularly distribute to their employees, making it useful for administrators to optimize their workflow.
• Regardless of why one opts to learn PowerPoint, Noble Desktop offers students comprehensive instruction options, both in-person and live online.