A couple of hopefully easy PowerPoint questions

[StealthPolarBear]

How do I add an eye catching and interesting little blob of colour at the bottom, to be repeated on each slide? Yes I could dd clip art, or whatever, but are there not some standard templates / designs that I can use within Powerpoint?

Also, I want to have a copy of the slides in front of me while I'm doing to presentation. Is there any way I can get something like the print option "Notes page" where there's a space for me to type in my notes? Or do I just have to do something clever myself?

Thanks for any help

OK, I'm running Vista, so my menus are a bit f*cked up but I can tell you roughly where to look.

1. You need the slide master (probably View>Slide Master). This develops a template style and background that is applied to all slides in the presentation. You can insert graphics etc into the header and footer in slide master and they will reappear in the same place throughout the presentation.

2)Notes. If you are looking at your slides in the 'normal' layout (View>Normal) you should find a pane at the bottom of the window that can be expanded upwards and when you type notes in there, they will print off in the 'notes' printout.

Hope that helps.

Second one, that makes sense thanks, I think I have seent hat before but didn't realise they would print off. That's just what I want, perfect!
FOr the first one, I'm in the slide master, but where do I find my "standard blobs of colour"? I know that sounds stupid, but do I have to search for something in clip art, or find an image on the web?

So...you want a small round blob of an interesting colour?

Probably easiest thing to do is draw it using the graphics toolbar, which is probably located at the bottom left of your screen. If you right click on a shape you can then tinker about with line colour, fill colour etc.

Or have I misunderstood what you're after?

Something like that - not fussy aboutt he shape!
Most of the others have already done their presentations, and they seemed fairly common so I assumed there were standard designs/backgrounds, but I can't seem to find anything. I'm not that fussed as I don't like crowded slides, might just add some dancing hamsters to each slide!
Thanks for your help

There are templates which you can download ( and normally some already installed with powerpoint) which have all kinds of interesting blobs lines and patterns. I'm on the iPhone now so I can't remember where to find them, but I'll have a look when I get to work. Are you using Office 2007 or 2003? (we have both at work)

2007
i asked a guy yesterday who had used them and he said they were in designs, but that's where I was looking.
Anyway, I'd still like to know thanks, but no urgency - presentation is over and I got very good feedback

I have about 20 when I go into the Design tab, one of them has a triangular blob at the bottom. You can change the colours by clicking on the arrow next to colours (or Colors, of course, as it's American)I haven't yet worked out what the 'effects' button does. Not sure why you can't see them though...

because I wasn't clicking on the scroll arrow at the side
They're still not what I was expecting, given what I've seen of other people's, but the guy I asked yesterday's was there.

Thanks!

I think Ppt 2003 had more designs, but these are a bit more flexible with the colour changes, and you can get more online.

The jury's still out for me on Office 2007 - I like Word better & what I've seen of Excel (especially the new Word Art, can't think why they didn't put it in Word as well), but I don't like publisher and I haven't really done much with powerpoint yet.

Yeah, I like it better - once you get used to it the menus are a lot more logical. Only use Excel and Word though, never use Publisher and Powerpoint only occasionally - so wasn't that attached to 2003 either!