How to use Gradients on Slides in Microsoft PowerPoint?

Microsoft PowerPoint is a powerful tool not only for making the best slides but also for graphic designing. You can do graphic designing on shapes, text, text-to-shape conversion, gradient fill, 3D text and shape, shadows, texture fill, pattern fill, 3D format and rotation, reflection, glow, size, position, etc. There is nothing that you cannot do in PowerPoint. After creating graphics you can give transition and animation effects which can act like a video or movie. PowerPoint provides many options to animate your shapes, transform your shapes, and color effects while animation, speed animation, mouse click effect animation, hover effect animation, etc. 

Coloring Background

Here in the post, we will discuss how to add gradient colors to your slides to make them look awesome. This is the basic thing to start with graphic designing in PowerPoint.

Step 1: Blank Slide – First open a blank slide in Microsoft PowerPoint. By default, PowerPoint will open a title slide in which you can add a title and a subtitle.  You can change it to a blank slide. go to home -> Layout -> blank slide. After that, you will get a blank slide as shown in the below image. It’s just like a blank canvas to start your imagination with. The only thing you need to learn is how to paint on this blank canvas which we will teach in this post. Stay calm, have patience and do the practical work side by side.

Blank Slide in PowerPoint

Step 2: So the canvas is ready. Now you might be thinking about where the tools/brushes to paint your canvas are. Don’t worry, it’s right there. right-click anywhere on the blank slide -> format background. A sidebar will open with all the options for changing the design and colors of the slide/shape/text. This is the powerful format background sidebar that will enable your imagination to land on this blank slide. We have only a blank slide until now, so we will only work on that. 

Format Background Sidebar

Step 3: For coloring the background there are many options (solid fill, gradient, texture fill, pattern fill, etc). You can try all the options. Just click on the option and choose the color. Learning by exploring is a great habit that helps in learning faster. In this post, we will only discuss Gradient fill.  Click on the Gradient fill option. Click on the Gradient fill option and you will see many options like the type of gradient, direction, angle, color, position, transparency, etc. By default gradient type is linear. You can set it according to your use.

Gradient Fill

Step 4: Click on any type of gradient as Linear. And choose the direction. There are many directions given in the drop-down options. You can try each and every direction to see how it looks on the slide. 

Gradient Options

Step 5: Now the important thing is to add and delete stops of a gradient in your slide. You can see a bar under gradient stops where you can add as many stops as required.  A stop is used to add another color to the gradient layer. By default, 4 stops of gradient colors are there on the stop bar. But for simplicity, we are going to work with 2 gradients only. Delete the rest of the 2 gradients. then set one of the gradients to the extreme left and another to the extreme right by sliding them. This is used to dissolve the gradient colors. The colors will be properly dissolved according to the color used and the distance b/w the gradient stop. 

Type of Gradient

Step 6: After that click on any of the gradient stops and choose any color. Do the same for another gradient stop. Here I am choosing pink and purple. This is a good color combination. You can have your own color combinations. You can choose more colors in the colors drop-down menu if the color is unavailable in the default palette or if you want to use another color. 

Gradient Stops and Colors

Step 7: You can also change the gradient’s direction and transparency according to your need. The role of transparency is that if you are using overlapping shapes or you want your background to be visible then it’s good to use transparency and it looks beautiful. Here I have not used the transparency effect. But at the end of this post, I have shared some images of slides with transparency effects.

Gradient Direction

Step 8: At last, you can add some infographics (text + images + shapes) to your slide and make it look Awesome. Some examples of slides that I have created:

Gradient Example 1

Adding a black color as a second gradient will create a beautiful dark gradient. Black color works will change most colors.

Adding a Black Color with Green Color

Adding a Transparent Shape Over the Background