Dr. Tara Bengle: Hello students. And thanks for your interest in the Smith Institute for Applied Research at JCSU. I'm Dr. Tara Bengle, and today I'm going to show you how to create a poster presentation in PowerPoint.
The first thing we're going to need to do is to adjust the size of the PowerPoint slide. Now, I'm using a Mac version, so the Windows version might look slightly different. I'm going to come here to the Design tab. Click on that. And over here on the far right, I can adjust the slide size, selecting Page Setup. Going to make it 48 inches wide by 36 inches tall. And this is the standard size that's used at most academic conferences. So by using this size today, you will be able to later print your poster if you're interested in that. And I'll also be recommending fonts and other sizes in this presentation today that are relevant and work with this size poster.
So click OK. Yeah, we can just go ahead and scale it. We don't actually need any of this content and that's where we're going to start, is by deleting this. Make sure you click on this text box here. If you'll see my cursor, I have the four arrows, that means I've selected it and I can just delete it. Come down here, and we'll do that again. And that way we're just getting rid of any existing formatting. All right, you'll see that I've already got my guides turned on and this is just going to help me with the layout. Keep things centered. If yours is not turned on, you can go to the View tab and you can select Guides right here. You've also got the ruler up there. OK? All right.
So the first thing that we're going to do is begin with starting to lay out our poster design. So I'm going to create the header, and then I'm going to create three columns. So we're going to do the header as a… We'll start with the text box there. I want it to stretch just about across, about three inches here. OK? Now I'm going to size this by using this tab that has now appeared, shape format. If I come over here on my right, I can also open up the format pane, which will be helpful. All right, so we're just going to adjust the size. We're going to make this three inches by 46 and a half inches. OK?
Let's come back over here and we'll go ahead and adjust our font size. So I've got this set on 72 already, and we'll want to center that font size. So we'll just put… There we go. Title, 72 point. You do want to use sentence case here. All right, that's capitalizing the first letter and other proper nouns in your title. Hit Enter. And here you're going to insert your name, but we're going to do this at a smaller size font. See what happens with 48. Name and institution. OK?
All right, now I'm going to add my columns. So I'm going to insert shapes here. We're going to make this a basic rectangle. I'm going to start with my center column. So we're going to make these columns. I'm going to use a three-column design. So we're going to make these columns 31 and a half, I think it was, and 15 wide. Now I need to place this, trying to get it in the center. And you'll see that I lined it up in the center if you look at the dot or the square there in the middle. Right? I'm going to bring it down just a little bit, and then I'm going to edit this, because I don't want a fill.
So right over here in format pane, I can hit No fill. I can also very quickly change the color of that line. So why don't I just set that to black. All right. I can copy, use control C, copy it. And then control V, paste it and move it to the right. And you see these little red dashes that are helping me to line it up so that the top of the rectangle is in line with the middle rectangle. All right, control V. I can paste another one, I'm going to do the same thing, making sure that my spacing looks fairly even, and then I can release.
All right. I want to do a little bit of formatting on this header up here. So I have the option again, the format shape option's popping up. So see that no line is selected, so let's do solid line. It's default on black there. I'm going to go back to that dark blue color, and I can also edit this shape. Let's round it a little bit. All right. So I'm taking a moment, looking at my layout. I'm pretty satisfied with it. Looks like these can come up just a tiny bit. Select all of them, use my cursor to move them up, but I've created my overall layout. I can begin to add some of the content.
So I'm going to have subheadings or headings for each of my sections, beginning with my abstract. So to do that, I'm just going to create another text box. I'm going to place that right about here. I'm going to go back into my shape format. I want to adjust the height of it. So this is going to be three quarters of an inch by 14.5 inches. And so, this will size nicely within this larger rectangle here. Let's go ahead and change the color of this. Notice, I can do it from here. I can make it dark green. Actually, let's keep with this blue that I used up there. Make it dark blue. Remember, I can also do this, make these changes over here as well.
Now we're going to adjust our text size. Coming back to Home. We're going to make, our body text is going to be 28 size font. So we're going to make this slightly larger. We'll go with 36. Let's make it white so we'll be able to see it, and we'll center it. Then call this Abstract. OK. Now we can copy, control C, or command C, command V to paste it. We come down here, we can call our next section Introduction. Command C and command V again to paste. And we're going to put our research statement, might be a research hypothesis, might be a research question, depending on your discipline.
And then it is possible that you'll also have a section called Study Area. So you might need to describe if you're focused on a case study or research in a particular neighborhood, you might need to describe that area. We need Methods section, and you'll want Results. And then we'll have Conclusion, Discussion. Conclusion and Discussion. These could be two separate sections.
Now, I've gotten a little sloppy and I want to make sure that these are lined up so that it's visually appealing. That looks fairly close. OK? You'll also want to make sure that you're including your bibliography. So any work cited in your poster, you're going to want to have a section on that. And then you also want to include funding acknowledgement, so if anybody supported your research. OK?
Within each of these sections, we also need to make sure that we've got text to go with that. All right? So I said earlier, I'm going to be using 28 point font. So add here, Abstract here. And you'll just do the same thing, you'll just, again, copy, paste and add this text box under each of your sections. Making sure, again, that you're formatting, you're lining that up consistently.
Right, so the final thing that I'm going to show you how to do is how to add some graphics. So one thing that everybody's going to want to include is the JCSU logo, which is available in the OneDrive folder. On a Mac, you can simply open that up in your Finder window and drag and drop it. OK? So I'm going to pick that up, bring it up here to the header, and I need to make it larger. So when I'm resizing it, and if I start doing this, it ends up stretched. And so then I might come down and try to do that. That's not how you want to do it. If you hit shift, and drag from the corner, is going to scale it and enlarge it for you. There's also the option, you can do it just like we did with the text boxes, see how we're in picture format here, and we can adjust the shape over here. If this box is checked, that's keeping this ratio the same. So it's scaling it as it enlarges it. OK? Put that at about two inches there, looks pretty good.
We can also add a picture by coming over here, we're at the Insert tab. Go to Picture from file. We can browse right here. And same process there, same effect. Your Methods section is the place where you might want to include some smart graphics. So we're going to go to the Insert tab, we're going to go to Smart Art, and with my methods, I want to show a process. So I've got a lot of options here. I'm just going to choose this basic process. OK?
And then I'm going to put in whatever my step 1 was, step 2 and step 3. Now I'm going to want to resize this, recolor it. So I'm going to come over here to the corner, going to push shift, so I'm not adjusting the… Whoops. So you got to make sure that you're grabbing on the outside. So I'm just going to hit command Z to undo that. Come in here, making sure that I'm grabbing the whole box, and this is still really large. So gonna want to size it more, make it even smaller. There. Oops, again. Make sure you're grabbing the Smart Art box.
Let's see. I actually can… Now I've got it the width, I can adjust it this way. Then on the outside, I'm just going to move it up. So we can also use our Smart Art design and Format tabs up here to change the color of this. If we go over here to Fill, we do have a fill. Let's see, Smart design. There we go. Solid fill. We don't want it white. Let's be consistent, and why don't we go with this lighter blue gray here. I'm going to do that for each of these. You can also click on your arrows and do the same thing to change that coloring. OK.
You can also insert tables directly into your poster presentation. Go to the Insert tab, you can click on Table. OK? And then you can just resize it so it fits within your columns. You can use the same options up here to change the shading. No fill doesn't really work that well. Change our text color up here and change our line over here. We can pick from some of these basic options right up here.
You're also able to insert… Oh, let me get off. Let me get off of the table there. You're also able to insert charts, and what this will do, this is going to link to an Excel spreadsheet. So you'll be creating the chart in the Excel spreadsheet. So these are just some basics to creating a poster presentation in PowerPoint. Please let us know at Smith Institute if you have any questions, and we wish you luck.