For some presentation slides, you might need a calendar as a background picture. For example, when you want to present some events or processes. Sure, there are a lot of existing templates that you can use, but it is easy to create your own calendar from scratch.

This is a very simple operation, but Microsoft PowerPoint tables are different from their realization their counterparts in MS Word or MS Excel, where you can change color for the border in the same place (see How to use paragraph borders and shading in Word and Apply or remove cell borders in Excel).

When you create a presentation, you might need to insert Greek symbols into the slide. This tip demonstrates how to insert Greek symbols using the equation block.

Sometimes you need to insert the special symbols to your slide. There are several different ways that you can use, but here you can see the fast and easy way is to use the equitation block. See also How to insert Greek symbols very quickly.

3D effects for your presentation help to make it more visually appealing. This tip shows you how to replace boring numbered lists with 3D cubes.

Often you see the elements of the slide like the company logo, copyright notice, or background picture, which you can't change or remove because they are part of the company template and seem to be read-only. However, the secret is that if you open the Slide Master, you can change every element of the slide.

Sometimes you need to combine two or more shapes for creating a fancy diagram or other visual elements. Sure, you can add these shapes to the slide and then group them. But in some situations, such as frequent use of the same groups of shapes, it will be more useful to create your own shape.

Often PowerPoint presentations contain a lot of different pictures and photos. This can become a serious problem because top-quality digital cameras nowadays create very high-resolution pictures, much higher than you need for the on-screen PowerPoint presentation.

When you create your own design on the slide, very often, it contains a lot of different objects such as pictures, diagrams, charts, text boxes, shapes, etc. Sometimes it is difficult to select one of the objects - it can be behind other objects, or it can be too small, etc.
PowerPoint proposes an excellent feature named Selection pane that can help to navigate between different objects and groups.

Visual consistency of the presentation is one of the keys to success. The audience often finds averting presentations with misaligned titles and font styles. Fortunately, PowerPoint provides you all the necessary tools for making your presentations consistent.