Welcome to PresenterMedia, my name is Kara Jones and today I am excited to talk to you about gradients; specifically, how to use gradients in your shapes and text elements within PowerPoint to create a presentation that pops! A gradient is a shape fill that gradually changes from one color to another across the surface of a shape. In PowerPoint there is a minimum of two colors for a gradient and a maximum of ten. That means that if you have a million colors that you want to include on your project, you are going to have to pick 10 of them. Now I will say that the way gradients work (by combining multiple colors to be able to find the mediums between everything) you will get to have multiple shades even if you do not have a million colors. To access your gradient options in PowerPoint, start by clicking on any object (whether it is a text box or a shape) and go to the top of your screen. You are going to see a button that says, “Shape Format”. This is even if you have a text box selected. Once you have shape format selected go to shape fill or text fill and scroll down to gradients. You are going to see the variations by default. If you click on more gradients, you will get a format shape box off to the right.
If you are not comfortable going through this menu selection up here, you can simply right click on any object and go to the very bottom and select format shape. that will open that same menu on the right-hand side. now all of these preset gradient options that you're seeing on my screen currently are options that are built into PowerPoint and they are all based on your design options and your theme colors so if you're familiar with design options in PowerPoint, or any office product, all you have to do is go to design and on the left hand side you can see all of the themes, so that's actual not just colors but that's also text boxes and how different font faces work, how different objects perform. On the right you see variants. Variants are the current theme that you are using, but it is different color variants. so, by us selecting a different variant you will start seeing these preset gradients change across the board. But they still match each other. We will click on the drop down and you can see the default options from office, and there are eight options for any given element, so we have a text color, a background color, and then we have six accent colors automatically. so, anything that you change in here any gradient that is using those theme colors is going to automatically update, and that's kind of a fun feature that you can use if you are not comfortable setting design preferences on your own. we are going to leave ours as default for now and this template will be available for you to download, so if you want to be able to play around with this on your own, you can be able to just download this at the link below.
When we click on any of these boxes, you will see that we have the format shape option on the right and then we have the preset gradients box. When I click on that you can see all the colors, and if you notice they match exactly. All I did was select the very top one for the first box, select the next box down, select the next preset. now if we do this, we will make a brand-new shape. Just make a little square (holding down the shift button will make your square a perfect square as opposed to just a rectangle). we will select gradient fill and here are our defaults so just by clicking on any of those you will be able to get that color and again if we change the design colors, you will notice that that box changes colors because these gradients are based on the theme colors.
That gets you through the preset gradients that come with PowerPoint. once you change this out of the accent family, so I am just picking some random standard colors, if you change your colors for the whole project notice how this one box now is not changing. that is because we are no longer using the theme colors in this box. this box is custom colors all by itself. now I am going to go ahead and click on it and go back to preset gradients and this one was, that guy there, so now it will go back to change with all its friends and we can have everything back to default.
moving on we have different gradient types and directions the types of gradients you have are linear radial rectangular and path. we also have one that is going from the title of a slide but that will be on the next section. linear gradients are lines that move from one direction to another. by default, there are eight directions of linear gradients and you can see them on the right-hand side where it says the type is linear and then you have a section for directions. These are all your preset directions, but you can customize this to whatever you would like in terms of what the angle is. so, by default we have a top left to the bottom right that is a 45, we have a straight down direction, 90 degrees, top right to bottom left, left right, right to left, bottom left to top right, straight up, and then bottom right to top left, and those are your linear options.
now if this confuses you at all think of it like this your gradient stop the first one that you see is the first direction that will be getting moved, so we will say this white for the last option we are going to change it to red and you can see how it moves from the bottom right to the top left. if you move that gradient stop you can see on that little square how the red is taking up more and more and more of the box. now if you want to have basically a hard line between the two colors, you just move those two colors so they are basically on top of each other and now you can get those to be exactly at 50% or 51%, and you can make that hard line on that object. so, this makes the gradient feel nice and subtle between the two colors, but you can be able to use those features if you want to show rings in a circle and things like. that speaking of which, the next section that we are looking at is called radial. radial is exactly how it sounds; it is a circle shape. so again, if we move these so it is not quite as subtle you can see from the bottom right corner, from the bottom left corner, from the center, from the top right corner, and the top left corner. These again are based on where the circle starts at, so if the top left corner is the true center of the circle is the actual corner of the image. you do have the ability with the radial to change the positioning of each of the pieces, just like we do on the linear. and you can adjust the transparency which will basically make it so there is more of an overlapping effect if you want one color to have a little bit more predominance over the other.
Next, we have rectangular; this is not to get confused with radial. radial is a circle that is coming out from a center point, a rectangle is obviously a square coming out from a center point. and we are just going to go ahead and pull this in so you can see how those angles show up. and as a fun fact so this from the top left corner, if we rotate this you can see how the rectangular color just moves with it. if you want to keep that rectangular color in the top unclick the rotate with shape and then as we rotate the shape notice that the impact is still in the same spot. Next, we have our path options. The path is going to be reliant on the shape, and a path gradient type means that whatever the shape is that is the shape of the gradient. so, in this case, it is a square so the gradient inside of it is a square. this shape is a heart(ish), so the gradient inside is also a heart. if you want to see how this changes simply use a rounded corner square. we will move the gradients too so you can see them easily. you can see they have the rounded corners now if we move this notice how the gradient also changes to be able to match the shape that it is inside of. we did do a few different custom shapes so you can see how those gradients are impacted by the shape itself the only one that was performing poorly was the custom shape and that was just random lines that I chose. it is easy to be able to make it look like it works properly but if you push the gradients together so you can see a hard line it does end up being a radial gradient as opposed to a true path, so keep that in mind if you are drawing specific shapes just for your project.
finally, for the gradient types is the background gradient this is unique to a slide background. you cannot do this with any other shape. slide backgrounds give you the ability to shade from the title. now this is a slide where I have a title and a body so if you create a brand-new slide by default you have a title and a body. the title anywhere I move it, the gradient follows. so, this is something that is fun that you can do if you want to have a little bit of a different effect on each of your slides. you can also use the morph ability within PowerPoint to make this default title you could have it morph down to a bottom left corner and have the gradient follow it. you can have a lot of fun with it. the options are endless.
next up we had a user who asked us how to create a metallic gradient. the older versions of PowerPoint had it built in it was nice, you could select silver or bronze or whatever the case may be. in this case the magic number is six. you want six different gradient stops and you need two different color options of those stops. you need to alternate it between the light and the dark. you can change the positioning based on the gradient stop and where it is at.
and finally, we have what I consider the playground, and these are just a few different things for folks to be able to learn how to use with gradients. this background is just white the shape option is just a solid white fill, but I did apply a gradient to the text (not the shape). now this is not a text a word art this is just regular text. and what we did do it is selected the text within the shape, so created a shape clicked inside of it started typing. just click on text options and you have text fill, and you will notice that you still have the gradient abilities. so, here is our start and our stop gradients.
again, we have the box right next to it where we selected the shape, and you gave the shape a gradient but not the text. this is normally how most shapes are done in PowerPoint. the gradient stops I wanted to point out that you can flip flop them, so if your blue is on one side and reds on the other instead of having to click them and then go through the colors you can just click and drag them. you can be able to modify which side you see now I will say though once you flip them everything is inverted, so as I move the red slider to the right, you are going to notice the red portion of the box going to the left because we flipped them so as I move that to the right that goes to the left and vice versa with the blue.
next up we have finding the middle ground, and basically PowerPoint will find the middle ground of any two colors in this case we did a blue and a green. if I change this green to a yellow what color do you think is going to show up in the middle of these two; nothing. because it is trying to find the true middle, it is not just going to give us green right when you mix blue and yellow together. if you want to be able to find the middle ground and create green, you must manually click it and then go find the green color that you want it to show up as. by doing this you are helping PowerPoint to be able to create the illusion of fading colors. since it will automatically try to follow, I recommend adding a little bit of transparency to that middle color just because it is going to help make it be a little bit more of a smooth transition between the two colors on either side of it.
Once you have started using gradients you will see the options are endless! Thank you so much for watching today's tutorial. Again, my name is Kara Jones with PresenterMedia. Remember to like comment and subscribe to our video for more tutorials on how to use PowerPoint to its fullest. Thanks, and have a great day!
