Powerpoint is a great presentation software since it allows the user a multitude of different options to clearly illustrate and present information. A very desirable feature is the ability to change and insert backgrounds of your choice for the slides. You can either assign a general background for all slides or even assign unique backgrounds for each individual slide.

Open Power Point.

Select the slide you wish to edit and right click on the slide. Now select Format Background. You will be presented with a menu that comprises of two main categories, Fill and Picture. You will primarily be using the Fill option to edit and change background settings.

Solid Fill:

This option allows you to change the color of the background as well as change the transparency of the color. Transparency basically functions as a tool to change the intensity of the color. Increase the transparency if you wish to set a lighter version of the color as the background.

Gradient Fill:

This option allows you to set a more attractive mixture of colors as the background instead of a single solid color. The effect is a rainbow like collage of gradually changing colors. There are several excellent preset colors that you can select from. You can also edit the type between lineraly changing colors to a radially changing effect to name a few. The available types of effects are:

• linear: the gradient colors flow in lines which can be from preset angles or a precise angle on the slide
• radial: colors flow in a circular fashion from your choice of five different directions
• rectangular: colors flow in a rectangular fashion from your choice of five different directions
• path: colors flow from the center out to form a rectangle
• shade from title: colors flow from the the title out to form a rectangle 

You can also make changes to the orientation and direction of these effects.

Picture or Texture Fill

This feature allows you to set different textures or even a custom picture for a texture. A texture works pretty much the same was as a solid gradient except that the design is more eye catching. Always make sure that the text is legible by ensuring suitable contrast between the texture color and text color. Powerpoint has several attractive textures available to be used. You can also insert new textures using the Insert From feature. Powerpoint stretches out any picture to fill in the entire background by default. You might want to click on the tile picture as texture feature so that a small image is used as a tile with multiple such images used to form a texture.

You can also utilize the additional offset feature to shift and move the background in any direction.  

There are two more important features present in the menu:

Hide background graphics:

This option allows you to easily hide/view background graphics from your slideshow. You can use the feature to reduce use of valuable color ink while printing and then easily turn it back on while presenting.

Apply to all

You can also choose to apply the background to all slides by clicking on the Apply to All option. Not doing so will ensure that the background you created will only apply to the slide you initially right clicked on to get the background menu.