Building Power Point Presentations

 As I lecture two days a week and am a firm believer of having my students take notes, I would be lost without a solid stash of PowerPoint presentations. There are a couple of different directions one can go with building a stash of PowerPoint presentations. I have some PowerPoints that go with specific chapters of the textbooks that I teach from, others I found on the internet and a vast majority of my library of PowerPoint presentations I built from scratch. I am going to try and put together a somewhat coherent how to on building welding related PowerPoint presentations. 

When I teach my Welding I course I start at the bgining of the year with welding and shop safety, then after a couple of weeks of that, just when the students are about to lose their minds due to me talking about welding safety, I go into Stick Welding or SMAW - Shielded Metal Arc Welding.

I keep mentioning that two of my favorite sources for questions are Nonresident Training Courses on welding, Steelworker, Volume 1 NAVEDTRA 14250 and NAVEDTRA 14119 which is for Hull Technicians. Both of these courses have questions at the end of the chapters and all the material is in the public domain which means that it is not copyrighted material - and that we can go berserk and copy and paste to our hearts content which we are going to do.

For SMAW - we take a deep dive into Steelworker, Volume 1 NAVEDTRA 14250 Chapter 8 Shielded Metal Arc Welding. Chapter 8 has 131 pages of material which is more than enough material for us to construct a handful of Powerpoint slides.

Topics

1.0.0 Introduction to the Process
2.0.0 Principles of Operation
3.0.0 Equipment for Welding
4.0.0 Covered Electrodes
5.0.0 Welding Applications
6.0.0 Welding Metallurgy
7.0.0 Weld and Joint Design
8.0.0 Welding Procedure Variables
9.0.0 Welding Procedure Schedules
10.0.0 Preweld Preparations
11.0.0 Welding Defects and Problems
12.0.0 Postweld Procedures
13.0.0 Welder Training and Qualification
14.0.0 Welding Safety

There is the list of topics for the chapter - once again more than enough material to build PowerPoint presentations from. 

One of the first things I usually do it to go through the whole document and use the Snipping Tool on the compute to capture any pictures and sketches that might be useful in both questions and in PowerPoint presentations.

Note - Make a folder on either a flash drive or on your computer where you can save all these images and sketches that you are going to capture using the Snipping Tool.

Snipping Tool - on Windows 10

From and earlier power this is the Snipping Tool is a Microsoft Windows screenshot utility included in Windows Vista and later. It can take still screenshots of an open window, rectangular areas, a free-form area, or the entire screen. 


The snipping tool is pretty easy to use, I am not going to put together a tutorial on how to use the snipping tool. There are well put together tutorials on the internet that cover the material pretty well. 

Below is a figure that I copied from Chapter 8 - SMAW - I saved it to a file and imported into this blog post. I use this tool when I am poaching sketches and pictures from the various US military manuals, DOT materials, and other non copyrighted materials.


I usually try to have some written material or text in my PowerPoint slides and for that I just copy and paste that into the slides. For this example of SMAW - Stick welding there are 131 pages of materials so there is plenty of text and material to fill up a heck of a lot of slides. 

So to get the written text just use copy and paste. You might have to do some formatting once you get the material pasted into the PowerPoint slides but it should be pretty self explanatory.

As far as captured pictures I generally reuse pictures in questions and in PowerPoint presentations. 


That slide was built with pictures poached from a USN training manual - copied and pasted into the PowerPoint slide. 

In closing if you don't have slides for a particular subject don't panic, just find a US Navy welding course or manual and start the copy and paste process and the construction of your PowerPoint presentation.


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