Topic 14- Presentation Software

Design templates

• Producing your own design for a presentation is quite hard
• It is easier to use a template
• Templates provide the design (e.g. positioning of item, font types and size, backgrounds etc)
• You simply have to enter your own content

Animation

• You can animate the way material goes onto a slide (this is done by presentation software)
• You can also create your own animations and add them to a presentation

An example of animation is in PowerPoint they can be classed as subtle, moderate or exciting.

Transition and timings

The movement from one slide to another slide is SLIDE TRANSITION. To make the presentation more appealing you can:

• Alter the way the slide appears on the screen
• Alter the speed at which the slide appears 
• Get the computer to make a sound when the slide appears 

Video and sound

Video and sound can add an extra dimension to a presentation to a presentation that will make it much more interesting and effective. 

Navigation

Navigation allows the user to select which slide they want to view next. A presentation can be interactive in the same way you would use a website. 

• Hyperlinks: icons, graphics or words on a slide, when clicked open another slide
• Hotspots: are images that contain links. Several hotspots can be used on a single image

Narration

Narration is speech that is recorded about each slide. This is a particularly useful tool when there is no-one present while the presentation is running. 

Speaker notes

These are notes that accompany a slide for the aid of the presenter. These notes can also be printed out and given to the audience for additional information

Printer formats

It is always a good idea to provide the audience with a copy of the presentation. it would be impractical to print a slide per page. The software will therefore provide the option of printing 2, 3, 4, 5 or 6 slides per page.

Advantages

• The use of presentation software makes the presenter look more professional
• It encourages the presenter to summarize what they are saying in a number of bullet points
• The presenter can print out the slides so the audeince ave some information to take away and digest
• The presenter is able to make use of full multimedia capability in their presentation
• Presentations can be stored and transferred to people who were unable to attend the presentation
• Presentations can be shown using a projector, whiteboard or TV or on a desktop or laptop computer system, so they presenter has flexibility in the way the presentation is delivered

Disadvantages

• The files for presentations containing video are extremely large and need a lot of memory and storage form them to run successfully
• The audience can get fed up seeing all these special effects that people tend to use
• Good presentations can take a long time to set up
• Sometimes people concentrate more on presenting the information than they do on the gathering of the information in the first place. This means that they information is sometimes incorrect
• Sometimes the sound effects and animations used in presentations can annoy the audience