Library: Infographics: Tips for using PowerPoint

Useful PowerPoint features for Infographics

Changing slide size

PowerPoint is primarily a tool for creating slide shows and so the default slide size is one that fits a wide-screen monitor. This is not fixed however, which actually makes it very adaptable for infographics. You can create a slide whatever size and shape you need (and you can adjust it as you work if you need extra space). To set your size:

Start a new presentation in MS PowerPoint.
Display the Design ribbon.
Click on the Slide Size button and choose Custom Slide Size.

This will display the dialog box shown below/right:

Screen shot of the Slide Size dialog box in PowerPoint

If required, change the Orientation option for slides to Portrait. (Check what you have been asked for, sometimes you can choose yourself but other times it is specified.)
For standard page sizes like A4 or A3, select A4 or A3 Paper from the options in the Slides sized for box.
The beauty of infographics is that you do not usually have to fit with a specific size and can enter any values you want in the Width and Height boxes. However, we give a few example sizes in the box on the right:

Example sizes

Tall and thin = 30cm x 70cm

Short and wide = 70cm x 30cm

Square = 50cm x50cm

Click OK
You will be asked to choose either Maximise or Ensure fit - choose either as it does not matter until you have elements on the slide.
You can now rearrange the boxes on the slide and add new ones as required.

Changing slide size later

If you find you need more room, or you over-estimated to begin with, you can easily go back to the slide size options and change your settings. If you do this, use the Ensure fit option after you have changed the size. This means your elements should stay the same size. However, extra space is added evenly top/bottom or left/right so you may need to use Ctrl-A (Select All) to select everything and move them where you need them (usually up or left).

Setting a colour scheme

Using a limited colour palette will give your infographic cohesion and harmony. To ensure you stick to your palette, it is a good idea to choose or customize a PowerPoint colour scheme as follows:

Choosing an existing scheme:

Display the Design ribbon.
In the Variants section, click on the drop-down arrow at the bottom left to get More options:

Where to click for More variants

From there, choose Colors. This will show the list of existing colour schemes.
Choose the one that is most similar to the colours you had in mind (you can customise it next). You may have to scroll slightly to see them all.
The drop-down will close and nothing appears to have happened - but if you go to change the colour of anything, you will see that the palette of colours it gives you has changed:

Default vs Aspect theme colours

Customising a scheme:

Create New Theme Colors dialog box

To customise your scheme, retrace your steps and choose Colors again.
Click the Customize Colors option at the bottom of the list.

This will bring up a list of the text/background and accent colours for you to change.

You don't have to change them all - usually just 2 or 3.

There are no fixed rules, other than to ensure you choose colours that give you enough contrast between your background and text and to avoid heavily red and green schemes as this is the most common form of colour-blindness. Get some ideas from here: Piktochart guide to choosing infographic colour schemes.

As you can see from the images of the themes above, each colour you choose will also give you tints of that colour so you have some lee-way to play with. You can also change the colours at any time and your graphic will automatically adjust.

Finally, give your scheme a name. This will make it easy to find amongst other custom schemes.

Using gridlines & guides

Gridlines and guides help you align and space infographic elements as you place them. You can toggle them on and off as you wish too.

Gridlines are fixed and show as a grid of dotted lines in front of your elements allowing you to see the spacing more easily. You can alter the spacing of the grid (see below).

Guides are moveable horizontal or vertical lines that you can position where you want to align things up. You can have as many as you need.

Showing gridlines and or guides:

On the View ribbon, check the Gridlines and/or Guides boxes in the Show section
OR right-click on your background and choose from the Grids and Guides options.

Editing grid and guide settings

On the View ribbon, click the small launcher arrow in the Show section.
This opens the Grid and Guides dialog box:

Grid and Guides dialog box settings

The default grid spacing is 5 grids per cm - but play about with the settings to get what suits you.

We recommend you have both the bottom boxes checked to help with lining things up. To be honest, the 'Snap objects to grid' doesn't seem to do a lot!

Adding icons and illustrations

PowerPoint has an extensive library of icons and some more complex illustrations as part of its stock images.

Icons are a staple of infographics - the can be used on their own, as meaningful bullets on a list of points, or they can be part of larger diagrams and pictograms. The icons are vector graphics which means they can be resized to any size without losing quality and if they are made up of multiple parts, they can be converted to shapes and parts removed, recoloured or even re-shaped slightly.

Example icons

The illustrations library is currently fairly limited, but they do give another, more sophisticated, option for some images. You can change the colour of anything that initially shows as yellow and you can convert to shapes and remove parts. If you want to recolour the grey/black parts, you would need to convert to shapes as shown for icons below.

Example illustrations

Inserting an icon or illustration

You can insert either icons or illustrations as follows:

On the Insert ribbon, select Icons. After a moment, the icon gallery will appear:

icon library

If you want to find illustrations, select the Ilustrations tab across the top (feel free to explore the other options too).
If you want to find an icon, either type a search term in the box above the gallery or use the themed tabs to explore.
Select the icon you require.
If you want to keep looking for other icons, keep searching and selecting icons - the number by the Insert button will indicate how many icons you will be adding.
Select Insert when you have found all you need.

All the selected icons will be inserted onto the middle of the 'slide'.

If you have inserted more than one icon, they will all be still selected. You can resize them at this point if you want them all to be the same size. If you want to move them or resize them separately, click away from them to deselect and then select and move/resize each one in turn.

Recolouring icons or illustrations

Icons or illustrations can all be recoloured as required.

When you have an illustration or icon selected, the Graphics Format ribbon should be visible - select it if necessary.
Regardless of the illustration or icon style you have chosen (thicker or thinner), use the Graphics Fill option to choose the colour you require.

Illustrations and icons being recoloured using Graphics Fill

If you have used one of the thinner icon styles, adding an outline colour in the same shade can 'thicken' up your image. You can also put one image over another to create a fill effect:

Thinner icon made thicker by adding an outline in the same colour Creating a fill effect on a icon by combining a thicker and thinner icon of the same design

Converting icons or illustrations to shapes

All icons and illustrations can be converted into their component shapes. If an icon is made up of separate parts, these can then be filled with different colours or deleted. If there are no gaps between icon parts, this is not possible.

Select your icon or illustration.
On the Graphics Format ribbon, select Convert to Shape (this is also available on the right-click menu). The icon or illustration is now a collection of grouped shapes.
If you click on a specific shape within the selected shape, you will be able to select it separately for recolouring:

Process of recolouring parts of an icon - select icon, convert to shape, select individual part, recolour, select any other parts necessary and recolour.

It is not always possible to recolour the parts you want - for example, in this graphic, only the heads could be recoloured separately:

icon of two people cannot have each one a different colour if their bodies are touching - only heads could be recoloured. Two separate people icons in different colours

If you wanted two people in different colours, you would just have to duplicate the single person icon.

Working with lines or arrows

Format shape pane showing the line options All the line style options can be found in one place if you open the Format Shape pane down the right of your screen.

Infographics often use lines or arrows. You may be familiar with changing the thickness or colour of these but there are some other useful options.

Changing line styles

Draw or select a line. (Hold the Shift key down as you draw to keep it horizontal/vertical/45^o.)
Right-click the line and choose Format Shape.

The pane shown on the right here will appear on the right of your PowerPoint window.

There are many different things you can change here - for infographics the most common things are the width, the dash type, the cap type and the arrow head options (shape and size). All these lines could be drawn using these options:

Different types of line - width, dash type, cap type and arrow types

Curved lines

There are several tools that create a curved line. Which you choose will depend on the type of curve you want. Here are just a few:

Arc tool: Just draws segments of a circle or ellipse. Curve tool: Click and move, click and move, each click is a curve. Double click to finish. Scribble tool: Drag to draw – rough line but can be tidied up using ‘Edit Points’. Curved connector tool: Use to connect shapes by clicking on their handles.

If you want to get really expert with editing shapes and curves, see this tutorial on using the Edit Points tool: How to Edit Points in PowerPoint.

Using elements from PowerPoint templates in your infographic

There are several PowerPoint templates full of elements that can help you put together an infographic. If you open these up whilst you have your infographic file open, you can just cut and paste the elements from one file to the other.

There are some that have pre-created full infographics - we would not recommend you use these in full for assignments as they do not give you the flexibility to craft your own narrative and visual arguments - but there is nothing to stop you picking elements from them to use in your own work or taking ideas from them. These include:

Perhaps more useful are the templates that are libraries of elements that you can use. Here are some examples:

When using these libraries, you can apply existing colour schemes to them. If you copy an element into your infographic file, it will pick up the colour scheme of the new file. So for example, if the full page of elements below was in a file with the 'Aspect' colour scheme applied (see above for how to change colour schemes), it would look very different as can be seen in the illustration. You could also select individual parts of each element and colour it manually if you choose (for example, the jigsaw element below uses tints of the Aspect scheme).

Any shape can also have text added to it - though it doesn't work perfectly with every shape and you may prefer to put text alongside or in front instead.

You may need to experiment with your text alignment and internal margins (available when choosing More Options from the Align Text button on the Home ribbon).

Infographics: Tips for using PowerPoint

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