8 Best Microsoft PowerPoint Courses for 2024
From effective business presentations to animated videos, master PowerPoint with the best online courses.
Quick Access:
- For beginners: Microsoft, Noble Desktop, Skillshare, Udemy
- Specials: Make Animated Videos, Business Presentations PwC
- Short Courses: Presentation Design for Business, Microsoft 365
Microsoft PowerPoint is a popular presentation application developed by Microsoft. PowerPoint is used anywhere from educational institutions to offices, and even used to create animated videos for YouTube. Whether you’re a student, a business person, or just someone who wants to pitch your ideas, learning PowerPoint is a valuable skill.
In this Best Courses Guide (BCG), we’ve selected the best Microsoft PowerPoint courses from over 300 Microsoft PowerPoint courses in our catalog, including offerings from popular course providers like Coursera, Skillshare, and Udemy. We’ll discuss the different features and benefits of each course, so you can choose the one that’s right for you.
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Here are our top picks
Why You Should Trust Us
Class Central, a Tripadvisor for online education, has helped 80 million learners find their next course. We’ve been combing through online education for more than a decade to aggregate a catalog of 250,000 online courses and 250,000 reviews written by our users. And we’re online learners ourselves: combined, the Class Central team has completed over 400 online courses, including online degrees.
Courses Overview
- Combined, these courses have accrued over 451K enrollments.
- Two courses are free or free-to-audit and six courses are paid.
- The Microsoft PowerPoint subject has been bookmarked over 20K times on Class Central.
Best Overall: Work Smarter with PowerPoint (Microsoft)
Exclusively from Microsoft, this free-to-audit course is intended for learners who are seeking to build presentation skills with Microsoft PowerPoint. If you are familiar with PowerPoint’s basic features you can take your skills to the next level.
By taking this course, you’ll be prepared for Exam MO-300: Microsoft PowerPoint (PowerPoint and PowerPoint 2019) which tests your ability to create and manage presentations, insert and format shapes and slides, create slide content, apply transitions and animations, and manage multiple presentations.
Concepts are taught through videos, readings and practice exercises. At the very end, there is an optional “Honors” assignment where you’ll apply all that you’ve learned.
This course is the last one in the Microsoft 365 Fundamentals Specialization.
| Institution | Microsoft |
| Provider | Coursera |
| Level | Beginner |
| Workload | 19 hours |
| Enrollments | 62K |
| Rating | 4.7/5.0 (695 reviews) |
| Certificate | Paid |
Skillshare’s Best Course for Beginners (Andrew Pach)
PowerPoint Design for PowerPoint Presentations is taught by Andrew Pach, Graphic Designer and PowerPoint expert. This course is divided into two main sections: the basic functions and the detailed process of designing your own presentation in practice. By working side-by-side with the instructor and completing projects, you’ll be able to produce a presentation like a pro.
The course has two sections:
- Teaching best presentation practices and useful PowerPoint tricks – Basic presentation knowledge.
- Slide-by-slide process of designing your own presentation – Each lesson will be devoted to tackling a slide one at a time.
The course is also available on Udemy: Powerpoint 2016 2019 365 – Master powerpoint presentation.
| Provider | Skillshare |
| Instructor | Andrew Pach |
| Level | Beginner |
| Workload | 8 hours |
| Enrollments | 10.8K |
| Rating | 99% positive (92 reviews) |
| Certificate | Available |
Best PowerPoint Bootcamp Program Covering Microsoft PowerPoint with Live Sessions (Noble Desktop)
If you prefer instructor-led learning, Noble Desktop’s PowerPoint Bootcamp offers real-time feedback and accountability that pre-recorded courses can’t match.
What I find interesting is that this program runs both in-person (NYC campus) and online (Zoom). Even if you’re attending online, you’ll have individual attention and can see other students in the classroom. You’ll be able to interact with instructors, receive feedback, and ask questions during sessions. Plus, you’ll get access to class recordings and workbooks – pretty helpful for catching up if you miss a class or reviewing what you learned.
Key Benefits
- Small class sizes (8-15 students)
- Certificate of completion to showcase achievements
- Free retake within one year
- Supplemental after-class video suite with bonus training.
Noble Desktop knows what they’re doing – they’ve been around for over three decades providing instruction with industry experts. So you can rest assured your mentorship will not be with someone who just finished the course. Don’t take my word for it – student reviews on Yelp and Google praise their practical approach and instructor quality.
What You’ll Learn
- PowerPoint basics, including layouts, graphics, and SmartArt
- Work with Tables & Charts, as well as design custom themes
- Utilize transitions and animations to elevate presentations
- Integrating tables from Excel and other external data sources
- Collaboration through comments and managing large slideshows.
Flexible Schedule Options
- 2 days full-time (weekdays)
- 1 week part-time (Sundays).
“I took this class after trying to figure it out using a textbook. PowerPoint is not an intuitive program. The instructor introduced the program in such a way that it was easy to grasp, and the exercises reinforced what we learned. I now feel comfortable in PowerPoint and confident that I can successfully create a deck from scratch.” – Faith Deutsch, Noble Desktop learner.
| Provider | Noble Desktop |
| Instructors | Garfield Stinvil, Dan Rodney |
| Level | Beginner |
| Workload | 12 hours |
| Rating | 4.8/5.0 (Yelp) and 5.0/5.0 (Google) |
| Certificate | Paid |
Udemy’s Best Course for Beginners (Kyle Pew)
Microsoft PowerPoint From Beginner to Advanced is taught by Kyle Pew, a bestselling instructor and a Microsoft Certified Trainer (MCT). This course is very detailed and well-structured with an excellent instructor.
By the end of this course, you will have mastered the basic features of the software, leverage advanced text editing operations and automate formatting, and be prepared to deliver a PowerPoint presentation with graphical elements and animations.
“This course is a great refresher and learning new things. I have a much better understanding of how to use PowerPoint to its fullest. Kyle Pew is an excellent Instructor, after taking the Excel and Word course. I made sure to catch his course on PowerPoint.” – Patrick M., Udemy learner.
| Provider | Udemy |
| Instructor | Kyle Pew |
| Level | Beginner |
| Workload | 7 hours |
| Enrollments | 79K |
| Rating | 4.6/5.0 (18K) |
| Certificate | Paid |
Best PowerPoint Animated Videos Course (Udemy)
How to Create Animated Videos with Powerpoint is taught by Paul Nekh, a Udemy instructor with 14 courses and over 123K students. This course will guide you in creating video animation for your business presentations, marketing campaigns, or social media sharing. This course also comes packed with video templates that you can use and customize right away.
“Detailed explanation with excellent training material and templates. The quality of templates shared exceeded my expectations.” – Manson L., Udemy learner.
Parts of this course is also available on Skillshare:
| Provider | Udemy |
| Instructor | Paul Nekh |
| Level | Beginner |
| Workload | 4-5 hours |
| Enrollments | 26K |
| Rating | 4.7/5.0 (5.7K) |
| Certificate | Paid |
Best Presentation Design Course for Business (LinkedIn Learning)
PowerPoint: Silicon Valley Presentation Secrets is totally awesome! It’s not just a PowerPoint learning course, but a lot more. As the name suggests, this course will tell you some of the “secrets” Silicon Valley professionals use to make their company presentations look so dazzling and eye-catching. So if you’re someone who isn’t satisfied with run-of-the-mill presentations, this course is for you.
Taught by Jole Simmons, a Senior Art Director and a Podcast Host, the course provides the best practice of presentation design through a combination of short videos and practical exercises.
| Provider | LinkedIn Learning |
| Instructor | Jole Simmons |
| Level | Intermediate |
| Workload | 1-2 hours |
| Enrollments | 158K |
| Rating | 4.7/5.0 (686 reviews) |
| Certificate | Paid |
Best Microsoft 365 – PowerPoint Crash Course (LinkedIn Learning)
Just like many other Microsoft Office applications, PowerPoint can also be used on the web. You can still use it to create impressive presentations while not having to install the desktop version of PowerPoint. Learning PowerPoint for the web (Office 365/Microsoft 365) is a course for users who know the basics of the PowerPoint desktop app, but are new to the web browser version.
Taught by Heather Severino, a Microsoft Certified Trainer (MCT). Concepts are taught through a combination of videos and practical exercises.
| Provider | LinkedIn Learning |
| Instructor | Heather Severino |
| Level | Beginner |
| Workload | 1-2 hours |
| Enrollments | 9.5K |
| Rating | 4.7/5.0 (147 reviews) |
| Certificate | Paid |
Also Great: Effective Business Presentations with Powerpoint (PwC)
Unlike the previous courses on this list, Effective Business Presentations with Powerpoint is all about presenting the story of the data using PowerPoint. This free-to-audit course is not your typical PowerPoint tutorial course, but rather, it’s about delivering your presentation through effective storytelling and communication. Remember, this is not a traditional PowerPoint course, and does not teach the technicalities of PowerPoint.
Concepts are taught through a combination of videos and readings.
For paying learners, there are a number of graded quizzes as well as peer-graded assignments throughout the course.
| Institution | PwC |
| Provider | Coursera |
| Instructor | Alex Mannella |
| Level | Beginner |
| Workload | 11 hours |
| Enrollments | 106K |
| Rating | 4.5/5.0 (1K) |
| Certificate | Paid |
How We Made Our Picks and Tested Them
Trying to find “the best” can be daunting, even for those of us who live and breathe online courses. Here’s how we approached this task.
First, we combed through Class Central’s Catalog and the internet to find a variety of free and paid open courses, some with certificates.
We extracted information from course syllabi and reviews, and compiled their ratings, leveraging the Class Central database with over 300 Microsoft PowerPoint courses and its thousands of course ratings and reviews written by our users as well as available course provider ratings. We watched some course videos to sample courses we hadn’t already taken.
Then, we defined the scope for these recommendations. A PowerPoint course can cover various topics, so we chose top courses from a range of sub-fields.
Ultimately, we used a combination of data and our own judgment to make these picks. We’re confident these recommendations will be a reliable way to learn PowerPoint’s main features.
Fabio revised the research and the latest version of this article.
Archisha Bhar
