People without graphical backgrounds often struggle to create engaging PowerPoint slides. Too much text, too many colors, and imperfect clipart found with a search engine all combine to create slides that aren't received well by an audience.

Professionals are mentored on communications, mentored on engineering techniques, mentored on processes, yet few are mentored on how to design an exceptional presentation. Conceptually, this course is the PowerPoint equivalent of an Executive MBA, targeting the working professional that wants to create more engaging presentations but has no desire to learn Adobe Illustrator, doesn't want to read a 400 page book on PowerPoint, and is disinterested in online videos showing how to create an entire fictional infographic. Built around structured content and delivered in a mentoring fashion, the course aspires to help even the most graphic novice improve their slide designs and more effectively communicate with any audience.

PowerPoint proficiency may seem like a daunting educational challenge, especially to those who incorrectly believe they simply can't draw, but in reality, proficiency of just the basic graphical operations within the tool lead to immersive designs. Intentionally designed to be about a 2.5 hour course, with the concrete examples and a little sweat equity on your part, you can become an immersive communicator.

Consider this analogy: a map with a shaded travel route and the owner's manual of a car is not equivalent to actually driving and experiencing the route yourself. In other words, you can't become more proficient inPowerPoint by simply looking at someone else's slides; you must re-learn how to think in shapes, a prerequisite for transforming the compelling visual designs you can imagine in your head into representative instantiations on the canvas of a slide.

It is critical to remember that as children we all learned how to draw before we learned to write. Somewhere along the way, many of us lost faith in that skill and today create incoherent slides full of too much text. This course aspires to help you remember how to think in shapes and it will demonstrate how even simple shapes like rectangle, triangle, circle, and trapezoid can unite to create amazing graphics that pull the audience into your message.We present a basic framework for creating immersive designs and review only the pertinent graphical capabilities required to deliver on that design -- it does not cover animations. Through the use of hands-on exercises with narrated solutions, you can build confidence in your graphic skills.This course is the launching point for your journey towards Immersive Communications with PowerPoint, and it includes over 100 native PowerPoint design and icons to help you move beyond novice slide designs.