Office of Medical Education Research and Development

Office of Medical Education
Research and Development
College of Human Medicine

Creating Posters in PowerPoint: Video Tutorials

Deborah A. Sleight, PhD

A poster is used to show highlights of a project so that people who read it can quickly and easily understand it. When you present a poster at a conference, your poster is one of many posters packed into a room. Potential readers may have hundreds of posters to choose from, and only an hour or two to read them. To make your poster stand out and invite people to stop and read it, it must immediately be clear what it is about, it must look interesting, and it must look like it can be understood in a few minutes.

You can create a poster in PowerPoint by making a giant slide, which is usually several feet high and wide. Using movies and a poster template, this tutorial will show you how to do it. There are versions of the video tutorial available here for PowerPoint 2010 and PowerPoint 2003 for Windows and PowerPoint 2011 for Mac. The principles are the same whether you are using PowerPoint for Mac or Windows; the only difference is where the tools are located.

You may watch the movies in any order. They are short, ranging in duration from 1 to 7 minutes. To get the most out of this tutorial, you should already have a basic knowledge of PowerPoint.

In addition to the short movies, there are resources provided, including horizontal and vertical templates, information on how to summarize information to put on a poster, and a self-paced tutorial that you can print. The self-paced tutorial is designed and formatted to be printed double-sided and in color.

VIDEO TUTORIALS

RESOURCES