Create Backgrounds Using Corel Presentations®

By Joell Haugan

A former workmate of mine used to grumble and complain that he was unable to edit images in his popular presentation application.  I quickly fired up my Corel Presentations® and fixed up his image in a minute and then he would paste back into his application!  For some reason he would go through this routine every week instead of just switching (that has always baffled me).. 

Creating good looking shows in Presentations is a snap and, perhaps even more importantly, creating professional looking masters (aka: templates) is possible without needing an expensive graphics editing application.

For the sake of this article I’ll focus on creating masters using Presentations   “background layer” which allows the user to create one or more than a dozen backgrounds for any given show or master.

Open Presentations® in Slide Show mode (as opposed to Drawing Mode).  Now, depending on which version you have (7-12) you will be presented with a default show with it’s own default colour scheme.  This is what the upper left part of the screen on my version 11 looks like by default.

1)  Go to EDIT/BACKGROUND LAYER (alternatively right click on an empty spot on the slide and choose BACKGROUND LAYER).  There you will notice at least two backgrounds already created (note the tabs at the bottom one named background and one name blank)

2)  Let’s first add a third background by going INSERT/NEW BACKGROUND (or clicking on the add background icon near the top left hand corner ) and change the suggested name to “Background 2".

3)  To rename the other backgrounds go to EDIT/RENAME BACKGROUND (or click the “rename background” icon on the toolbar  ) and change “Background” to “Background 1" and then “Blank” to “Background 3".

4) Click on the “Background 1" tab.

One of the neat things about the background layer... is that it has it’s own background layer!

5)  Right click on the screen and choose “Page Setup” (or go FILE/PAGE SETUP) and click on the FILL tab (Presentations verion 9 and previous say “page colour”).  Here we are going to define how the background page will look.  A hefty array of patterns, gradients, bitmaps and textures are here!

6)  Let’s change the default colours of this page to green and white.  For this page’s foreground colour click on the “foreground colour” button    and select a solid fill of olive green (RGB 0 - 80 - 0)

7)  To see the colour codes and names hold the mouse over the colour squares and they will pop up.  For additional colours click on the MORE bar

8)  Click on the “background” colour button and choose white.

9)  Hit OK which takes us back to the background 1 page

Now we want to make all of the backgrounds have variations on the colours we have picked.

10)  Click on “background 2" tab

11)  Then right click and go to “Page Setup” (or FILE/PAGE SETUP) and choose our foreground and background colours again (olive green and white Note: the most recently used colours will always show up in the top row.

12)  Click on “Gradient”      Note: hold you mouse over the “Fill Style” boxes to see the pop-up name of each

13)  From the previews below choose the top left hand corner one

14)  Click OK which take us back to “Background 2" and we can see the new page look.

15)  Now click on the “Background 3" tab. 

16)  Again go to page setup and this time choose olive green and white for foreground and background colours.

17)  This time choose PATTERN fill (usually comes up by default)

and pick the second one on the top row in the left corner.  

18)  Click OK and your screen should look like this:

We now have three backgrounds with variations of olive green.  Now it’s time to add some more thematic elements.

19)  Click back on “background 1."

20)  Click on the “Bitmap Editor” brush icon  (or click INSERT/GRAPHICS/BITMAP)

21)  Create a rectangle the size of the slide using you mouse and dragging while holding down the left button.  This will automatically open the bitmap editor.

Here we’ve have at our disposal a large number of bitmap tools to create an element.  In this case we’ll create a green and white gradient fill to act as our title bar.

22)  First make sure our fill colours are olive green and white from FORMAT/OBJECT PROPERTIES/FILL. 

23)  Choose “Gradient” fill and select the fill that looks like it is an “X”

24)   Then click the “reverse colours” button to change it to look like this:

25)  Click OK. Note: you still will see no fill in the bitmap box!

26)  Click on INSERT/FLOOD TOOL (or the paint roller fill tool   ) and fill the entire box by left clicking in the box (you may need to scroll to the right and fill in the rest of the box). 

27)  Then, right click and “close bitmap editor” and we’ve got our title background!

28)  Position the bitmap so it’s near the top of the slide and covers the entire width.

29)  To add text to our title are go to INSERT/TEXT BOX (or click on the “Insert text” icon   )  and left click and hold to drag a box inside our title bar.

30)  Type in “2004 Report” and then click outside the text box to deselect it.

31)  Click on the text once (to select the box) and then select FORMAT/JUSTIFICATION/CENTRE to centre the text.

32)  While still selected go to FORMAT/FONT/SHADOW and add choose white as the shadow colour. Click OK

33)  Now, we want to join the text box to the bitmap box so select both the gradient title box and the text box (hold CTRL while clicking on each or simply use CTRL-A to grab them all).  Right click on the selected are and select “group”.

34)  Now, the text and the box will stay together. Now let’s copy this and add it to each background slide.  With the text/bitmap box selected (click on it once) hit EDIT/COPY (or CTRL-C).

35)  Click on the “background 2" tab and then EDIT/PASTE (or CTRL-V).  Drag our title bar to the bottom of the slide. FIG 27. Repeat for “background 3."

We’ve now have 3 unique backgrounds that are based on the same olive green theme.

Now let’s add an image that will repeat on each slide.. 

36)  Click on the Scrapbook icon on the toolbar and insert the image  of the man holding a laptop (or go to INSERT/GRAPHICS/FROM FILE and insert this image.

37)  The big white background on our green page isn’t very attractive (FIG29) to let’s make the white background transparent. 

38)  Double click on the image and this will open up the bitmap editor

Go to FORMAT/SET TRANSPARENT COLOUR and choose the colour to be filled in as transparent (white will do). Click on the eraser tool   and carefully draw a line around the guy and his laptop.  To do this easier let’s use the zoom tool (VIEW/ZOOM).

39)  Use the left hand panes to move the editing area to where you want it (drag the box).

40)  Click on the “brush size” icon    and choose a 2 pixel wide brush for this process.

41)  Begin to colour in an area around our man and his laptop.  Note: the area that you are “erasing” is turning grey which indicates the transparency is working.

42)  Make sure we don’t leave any white pixels behind (note: had this image’s background been one colour of white (instead of many) then we could have simply filled the background with a transparent colour).

43)  Once we’ve traces a line around him begin filling in the rest of the background. VIEW/ZOOM to begin filling in larger area and increase the brush size to 15+ to quickly get rid of the rest of the white area.

44)  Now close the bitmap editor (FILE/CLOSE BITMAP EDITOR) and we’ve got our man!

45)  Click on the “handle” in the corner of the image and drag it down to make our image about ½ the size.

46)  Then click on the image and drag it to the bottom right hand corner.

47)  Copy and paste the image to the other backgrounds

Note: Presentations will copy the image into the exact same location that it was copied from which prevents trying to line it up after the fact!

We have now created 3 custom backgrounds and it’s time to save is as a master.

48)  Go to FILE/SAVE AS and change the default file type to “Presentations®   Master 7/8/9/10/11" and save.

To test your new backgrounds head back to the slide layer and create 3 new slides.  Right click on each one and select “appearance” and then click on the background you want for that slide.

Run the slide show and see how your new backgrounds display.

This extensive tutorial was contributed courtesy of Joell Haugan. Learn more about Joell in our Contributor's section.