If you build decks for sales calls, board meetings, or training sessions and want them to communicate instead of decorate, this is the day that gets the slides out of the way of the message.
Who delivers this: Christopher Ross · PowerPoint trainer for sales, executive, and L&D teams · classroom training delivery since 2004 · MA Candidate, Learning and Technology, Royal Roads University
PowerPoint 101 is the practical day for people who present to make decisions happen: sales meetings, board updates, training delivery, internal proposals. I teach it because the most common deck I see is not badly designed, it is badly aimed. Someone built slides to read like a document and then tried to present from them, and the room ends up reading instead of listening. By the end of this day you will know what each slide is actually for, you will have built a deck that survives the “can you send me the slides” follow-up, and you will leave with a small set of opinions about templates, charts, and animations that will serve you for the next ten years.
Who this is for
- Fit. Sales teams building proposal decks, executives preparing board updates, project managers running quarterly reviews, and trainers shaping live or recorded sessions.
- Fit. Anyone who has been handed a 90-slide template from their organisation and told to make it look good for a 20-minute talk.
- Fit. Teams switching from Google Slides or Keynote and wanting the PowerPoint conversion to actually land rather than read like a screenshot of the old tool.
- Not fit. Designers building branded deck templates for an organisation. That is template-design work, not PowerPoint training. Reach out and I can scope it separately.
- Not fit. People who want to be taught animation tricks as the point of the day. Animations come up where they earn their place; they are not the point.
Prerequisites: a working Microsoft 365 PowerPoint license (desktop or web), and one deck you have built in the last six months you can bring to the session. That is the bar.
What you’ll be able to do after
- Plan a deck before you build it: what each slide is for, what the audience walks out remembering, what cuts.
- Build slides as billboards rather than documents, one idea per slide, scannable at a meeting-room distance.
- Use the Slide Master and a custom theme so the deck stays consistent without copying-and-pasting layouts.
- Make charts that read: the most common chart-as-decoration mistakes, and how to fix them with two clicks.
- Present from Speaker View with your notes, while the audience sees a clean slide rather than your script.
- Send slides as a follow-up that carries the message without you in the room, because the deck for the meeting and the deck for the reader are not the same document.
The day, block by block
- Build a slide the back row can read in three seconds. You will learn to put one idea on a slide, write a headline that earns the slide and matches what the slide actually delivers, and see why a deck of thirty short slides usually beats one of eight dense ones. We take the wall-of-text slide and the “agenda” slide nobody reads and decide what to do instead. In the room, this is where people stop apologising for their slides and start cutting them.
- Make consistency structural so you stop fixing it by hand. You will use the Slide Master so a brand colour or font change is one edit instead of forty, set up theme colours, fonts, and placeholder layouts, and build reusable layouts for the slide shapes you make every week. We import a brand template and tame it so it stops fighting you on every slide. What I watch people do is rebuild the same layout over and over; this block ends that.
- Make a chart that makes the point on first scan. You will fix the chart-as-decoration mistakes I see most: 3D pies, hundred-line line charts, and axes that start somewhere other than zero when they shouldn’t. We decide where SmartArt earns its place and where it doesn’t, turn the data table that should have been a slide title into one, and add icons, images, and the alt text that keeps the file accessible. The habit I want you to leave with is asking what the chart is supposed to prove before you format it.
- Present cleanly, then send a deck that works without you. You will set up Speaker View, presenter notes, and a second monitor, and learn an animation budget: the difference between a transition that supports the point and one that interrupts it. Then we handle the deck after the room, handout view, exporting to PDF, and the appendix-slide trick for follow-up questions, so the deck survives the “can you send me the slides” request without losing the message you delivered in person.
Real examples we’ll work through
- A live rebuild of one slide from your existing deck, the wordy one you knew was a problem, using the billboard pattern.
- A chart you brought in that reads badly today, rebuilt in two clicks so it makes the point on first scan.
- A Slide Master adjustment that propagates a brand colour or font change across the deck without you touching individual slides.
Where this fits in the Microsoft PowerPoint track
Shaped for: Sales teams, executives, project managers, trainers, and anyone who builds decks where the slides have to earn the meeting they are in.
I will say it plainly: there is no PowerPoint 201. PowerPoint 101 is the complete standalone day, and that is on purpose. Once the billboard habit, the Slide Master, readable charts, and presenting cleanly are yours, you have the part of PowerPoint that decides whether a deck lands under control, and a second day of PowerPoint would be padding. When people ask me what comes next, the honest answer is one of two things. Either a different application is the real bottleneck (Excel for the numbers behind the charts, Word for the proposals, Outlook for the inbox), or your team presents in a way specific enough that a tailored private session beats any catalogue course. I would rather point you to the right next thing than sell you a day you don’t need.
The full training catalogue shows how the Microsoft Office courses sit alongside the WordPress training track, and is the right place to find the real onward path.
Format, duration, and pricing
PowerPoint 101 runs as a single full-day class, six hours, in person across the Niagara region or online over Microsoft Teams. The two half-days format works well for sales and L&D teams who cannot block a full day; the half-day compressed format is a working introduction rather than a complete multi-day program.
| Format | From price (CAD) | Notes |
|---|---|---|
| Half-day compressed (3 hr) | from $750 | A working introduction |
| Full-day class (6 hr) | from $1,495 | The standard format, online or in person |
| Two half-days across a week | from $1,495 | For teams who cannot block a full day |
In-person delivery includes room setup, reference materials, a post-training summary for managers, and travel within the Niagara region. Online delivery includes the recording if you need it. Final scope and quote confirmed on the discovery call.
Currently booking through Q3 2026. One public cohort per quarter; private team engagements scheduled separately.
Common questions
Who should take Microsoft PowerPoint training – level 1 (Microsoft 365/2021)?
This course is for anyone who regularly builds decks for business presentations (board meetings, sales calls, training sessions) and wants the slides to carry the argument rather than distract from it. You will learn to structure each slide around a single idea and set up a Slide Master so formatting looks after itself, with specific attention to charts a room can read from across the table. The focus throughout is on presentations that move decisions forward.