For those of you who are interested in creating content marketing material with visual impact, it’s hard to beat the incredibly effective and popular infographic. I’ve discovered that you can make fairly decent infographics using Microsoft PowerPoint. Yes, that’s right. PowerPoint.

Start by sizing your slide as “Custom” under the Page Set Up menu to create the infographic palate size you want (in this case, I went with 30 inches x 90 inches).

From there it’s simply a matter of making use of PowerPoint’s text, shape, and image tools. To create icons, combine various shapes from the shapes menu, position, color fill, and size the pieces appropriately until you have your recongizable icon, and then highlight each component (Shift+Right Click) and conjoin them as a group (there is a group option in the menu). You can then move, resize, and manipulate your icon as a single piece.

When you complete your infographic, save it as a .PNG file and share away.

I’m not much of a graphic designer, but if you are, you can produce some pretty decent results. It’s not as slick as Adobe PhotoShop or Illustrator, mind you, but it’s much more impressive than I expected, and it uses software that most business people have on their laptop already. My first shot at this is below. Happy Holidays to you, and happy content marketing.