How to Search Google for Free PowerPoint Files

In the course of my work as a teacher of social studies for Junior high school students I use Microsoft Power Point quite a lot to present information to my class. When I first really started using Power Point I was at times overwhelmed by the time consuming effort it took to put together something presentable to the students. I went to a local computer conference for teachers and attended a Google power user session with a great speaker named Brian Mull. He taught among other things how to search Google for free Power Point files. In this session I realized that there may be plenty of Power Point files on various social studies topics that are already posted on the internet by other teachers. This is a great tool to use for teachers or anyone else looking for Power Point files on just about any topic. If you need to find one, let’s take a look at Google and see how to go about doing that.

The first thing you’ll need to do is go to Google’s main page at google.com. Then you’ll need to click on the on the small link to the right of the search box that says Advanced Search. See the screen shot below for what this should look like. Once you get to that page then you need to fill in what you want to look for. One of the first times I used it was to search for some Power Points on Lewis and Clark. So I typed in the second box for the exact phrase “Lewis and Clark”. If I were to type that phrase in the first box I’d get a lot of results back from Google that I don’t really need. Anything with the words Lewis, and, Clark would show up so I want to be more specific and look just for files that have “Lewis and Clark”.

Next thing you need to do in learning how to search Google for free Power Point files is go down the page to where you see the box for language. The default in the box says “any language.” You of course don’t want to search for Power Point files in any language so you need to click the drop down arrow and choose “English”, if that’s what you need. The available languages to search are listed in alphabetical order. I really didn’t want to find a Power Point file about Lewis and Clark written in Chinese although I wonder if there really is one out there somewhere.

The next important thing we need to do in learning how to search Google for free Power Point files is to choose our file type. The default in this box says “any format.” This is very important that we click this drop down arrow and find the format that we need. You’ll notice here that there are a number of different options from which you can choose from. We’ll need to scroll down to Microsoft Power (.ppt). If you wanted to search for Power Point files only from the college level, you might choose to only search from .edu domains in the box below. I’m not going to do that so I’ll just click the Advanced Search button and see what happens. You’ll notice the screen shot of the search results below. You can see off to the left of each result that all of these are Power Point files by the (ppt) next to each one. After a couple of minutes of clicking through these results I found a number of Lewis and Clark presentations that I opened and saved and made a few changes to and was able to use in my class. This is a great time saver and could be adjusted to suit whatever needs you might have. Go ahead and check out the cool things you can do with Google’s advanced search feature. You’ll be amazed.