Intro to Presentation Graphics with PowerPoint



Intro to Presentation Graphics with PowerPoint

The primary purposes of PowerPoint: creation of visual or multimedia aids (“slides”) for an oral presentation, and display of these slides when you give a presentation.

The PowerPoint program is launched by clicking its button (looks like a computer monitor) or by clicking Start, All Programs, Microsoft Office, Microsoft Office PowerPoint 2003. You might want to start creating a new presentation by choosing a Design Template – a selection gives you background graphics and colors, font colors, and other formatting properties, all of which can be changed. I recommend you consider the following points in designing your slides:

• You should have lots of contrast between foreground (text) and background colors so that your text is easy to read.

• If you anticipate printing your slides, consider the following. Many printers don’t print background colors. Therefore, I recommend dark foreground and light background colors.

• Also, suppose your background colors print, but you use a black-and-white printer. A color contrast that looks good on your screen might not look good in black-and-white, since the colors are converted to shades of gray.

Slides are composed, typically, of text, graphics, and possibly other media forms, including sound and video.

Graphics can be introduced in a variety of ways, including:

• An image can be copied from many different software packages. These include a Web browser, a drawing/art program, an Excel chart, etc.

• Clip Art is available as in Word.

• Word Art is available as in Word.

Notice the View buttons that appear toward the bottom left corner of the PowerPoint window.

• The Normal View is used to edit slides.

• The Slide Sorter View is typically used to change the order of the slides.

• The Slide Show View is the view used to see the slides in “full-screen” when you make your presentation. Normally, you highlight the first slide before clicking the Slide Show View button, since this view starts with the currently highlighted slide. As you go through your presentation, you can click with the mouse or strike the right-arrow key to bring the next slide (or slide element) into view. You can go backwards by striking the left-arrow key. You exit the Slide Show View by striking the Esc key.

If a slide has a lot of text, suggesting several topics, we have seen that the presenter may distract the audience by tempting the audience to read ahead of the presentation. For example, if a slide has four bullet items, all appearing at once, then the audience is likely to read all four bullet items while the presenter is talking about the first item. It’s preferable for the audience to pay attention to the presenter’s discussion of the first item. This can be controlled by using “custom animation,” which allows the presenter to control when slide items appear. In the Normal View, if you click Slide Show, Custom Animation, a task pane appears. Items not selected for animation on the Custom Animation task pane for this slide appear when the slide first appears. Items selected for animation will appear when the presenter wants them to appear (by clicking the mouse or striking the right-arrow key).

Notice we can:

• add or remove items from the list of animated items;

• change the order of animation by using the reorder buttons;

• group animated items to appear together, by placing them consecutively in the list of animated items and then, for example, clicking the drop-down arrow associated with the 2nd item of the group and choosing Start with Previous from the resulting menu.

Use of text items: If you’re not careful, you’ll be tempted to use your text items as a script, and end up reading your presentation to your audience. Thus, your voice may drone, you may lose eye contact and interaction with your audience; audience members are more likely to get bored or to have difficulty focusing attention on your presentation. I recommend you use text as an outline, so it can be an outline and visual aid for your audience, and a reminder to you of the sequence of topics. As presenter, you probably have enough expertise on your subject that you can talk smoothly using only an outline, not a script.

Other PowerPoint features you might find useful:

• By clicking View, Color/Grayscale, and either Grayscale or Pure Black and White, you can see how your color slides would convert to grays or to black and white, for example, if you print on a monochrome printer or present on a monochrome monitor.

• You can change your slide design as follows: Click Format, Slide Design. A slide design task pane comes into view. If you click a slide design, it’s applied to all your slides. Or, if you wish to change the design of selected slides: select the slides (if there’s more than one, use the Shift key (for consecutive slides) or the Ctrl key (for adding one slide at a time to the group selected) to create a group of selected slides); right-click on the desired design; choose Apply to Selected Slides from the resulting menu.

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