Introduction to “Presentations” with MS PowerPoint

As word processing offers important technological advances over typewriting, and as spreadsheet usage offers important technological advances over the use of hand calculators, PowerPoint presentations offer important technological advances over the use of other forms of audio-visual aids such as blackboards, whiteboards, and slide transparencies. We might say that the purpose of PowerPoint is to help you create and use visual aids (perhaps, also, audio aids) for an oral presentation.

You can start the PowerPoint program by clicking Start, All Programs, Microsoft Office, Microsoft PowerPoint 2010. A PowerPoint data file is called a presentation, made up of multiple slides. A slide prints as a page, and is typically used for text, graphics, and possibly links to sound files, etc.

On the Design tab, you can choose from a variety of “themes.” A choice of a theme means you are choosing certain aspects of the style of your slides, including font and background colors and patterns.

·  How you choose a theme should be partly determined by how serious, or how light-hearted, you expect your presentation to be.

·  It’s useful to consider contrasts of colors. A combination of background and foreground (font) colors with little contrast will be difficult for audience members to read. Therefore, choose a theme with lots of contrast.

o  Depending on how your computer (using PowerPoint) communicates with your printer, you may find that background elements don’t show up in hardcopy. As a result, if you have chosen a theme with light text on a dark background, it could be printed as light text on white paper – difficult to read. Therefore, the safest choices use dark text on light backgrounds.

o  Sometimes, a theme that looks good on your computer screen will not look good translated into black, white, and gray by a monochrome printer. Notice, on the View tab, the buttons labeled Grayscale, and Black and White. These can be used to preview the conversion of your slides into black, white, and gray, as might be rendered by a non-color printer.

Slide elements may include:

·  Text, entered in textboxes.

·  Graphics, which may be introduced via tools of the Insert tab (much as studied in Word); or, via copy-and-paste.

·  Data copied from other software; e.g., cells and charts of an Excel workbook can be copied into a presentation.

·  Video and audio clips can be introduced by using the Video and Audio buttons of the Insert tab.

·  Etc.

You can insert a new slide into your presentation by using the New Slide button of the Home tab.

Notice the view buttons towards the bottom of the PowerPoint window. The current view is represented by its button displaying an orange background.

·  The Normal view is typically used to edit an individual slide.

·  The Slide Sorter view is typically used for operations that involve multiple slides. In this view, you can see “thumbnails” (small versions) of multiple slides simultaneously. E.g., we can sort the slides (change order) by using drag-and-drop operations in this view. Also, you can use this view to delete an unwanted slide: click on the unwanted slide and strike Del.

·  The Slide Show view is usually used when you present to an audience. In this view, a slide is magnified to fill the screen. You can advance through slides and animated (to be explained soon) slide elements by using any of the right-arrow key, Space bar, or mouse click; you can go backwards by using the left-arrow key or the Backspace key. Exit the Slide Show via the Esc key.

Often, a slide outlines a large portion of your presentation in considerable detail. If, e.g., you have a list of text items, you may have several minutes of spoken material related to the first list item; but if the entire slide becomes visible at once, your audience will read ahead, so you will lose their attention. Since you want your audience to focus attention on your currently spoken wisdom, it’s desirable that you can control when slide elements appear. The capability of doing this is “animation.” Note arranging animation is quite different in PowerPoint 2010 than in earlier versions.

With the cursor at a slide item for which you wish to arrange animation, click the Animations tab. On this tab, you can choose an animation – an entrance effect such as Appear, Fade (fade in), Fly In (from the bottom of the screen), etc.

In general, you shouldn’t animate every slide item. Non-animated items appear when the slide first appears; an animated item appears when it’s its turn to appear, as controlled by the presenter advancing through slides and slide items. Thus, if you animate everything on a slide, the slide will appear initially blank. Your audience is likely to regard a blank slide as a sloppy waste of time. Items such as a slide title probably should not be animated so they can appear when the slide first appears.

The Animation (task) Pane button of the Animations tab gives a lot of power over the editing of animations. Suppose, e.g., we currently have several list items animated to appear together (e.g., the list of the deans’ names), and we would prefer to have them appear individually.

·  We can cut the list of deans’ names and paste into a new textbox that can be selected for animation.

·  Use the reorder buttons of the Animation task pane to place this textbox in the desired order of appearance.

·  To animate the deans’ names to appear individually, do the following:

o  Click the drop-down arrow button adjacent to the textbox containing this list (or set of paragraphs) in the Animation task pane.

o  On the resulting menu, choose Effect Options.

o  Choose the Text Animation tab from the resulting dialogbox.

o  Choose By First Level Paragraphs to have Level 1 paragraphs or list items appear individually; By Second Level Paragraphs to have Level 2 paragraphs or list items appear individually; etc.

To have each dean’s picture appear simultaneously with his/her name – an example of the more general process of animating multiple items to appear simultaneously, do the following:

·  Make these items consecutive in the order of animation.

·  For each of the items except the first of them that you want appearing simultaneously, click the drop-down arrow adjacent to the item on the task pane and choose Start With Previous from the resulting menu.

Additional guidelines concerning good and bad use of PowerPoint:

·  Don’t use the text of your slides as a script. If you use text elements as a script, you will probably end up with your voice becoming droning and monotonous, which will result in a loss of audience attention; you’ll probably also be staring either at the computer screen or the projection screen, which will greatly limit your eye contact with audience members. Instead, you should use text elements as notes or as an outline of the totality of what you have to say. As the speaker, you’re the expert in the room, so you should have the confidence that you know your material well enough that you don’t need a script.

·  Don’t show off. Use enough graphics, entrance effects, sound effects, etc., to make your slides attractive and interesting, but not so many that the audience feels you’re showing off your technical mastery of PowerPoint instead of presenting material on the subject of your talk.