13. CREATION OF PRESENTATION TOOLS USING COMPUTER
Visual aids such as 35mm slides, OHP
transparencies, Display posters etc. are excellent tools for impressive
presentation of ideas or concepts to a group. It is no longer needed to get them
done by laborious and manual work of an artist or using a type machine with all
its problems of availability of
expertise, time constraint etc. Now one can easily prepare impressive and custom
made (to ones needs & taste) tools using a personal computer. The software
required are a windows 95/98 package
or next versions and MS Office with ‘Power point’. The other presentation
software i.e. ‘Harvard Graphics’, ‘Corel draw’ and ‘Photo abode’ are
optional. There packages are very useful to made presentations with titles,
text, graphs, draw objects, photograph images and other visuals. Handouts for
audience consisting of small size printed versions of slides and speaker notes
can also be prepared for convenience. With little more efforts you can even
prepare an onscreen show for using with a LCD Projector.
Power Point:
A power point presentation is a collection of slides, handouts, speakers
notes and your outline all made in one file. As you are creating a presentation
you are also designing how your presentation look and give it a format that
carries from beginning to end. It is an extremely powerful presentation
programme, quite flexible and easy to learn.
It is quite an easy job even for a novice user to design a power point
presentation using its ‘Auto content wizard’ facility. It is a guided
approach to create a presentation. All that you have to do is to answer certain
questions that appear on the screen. Then the wizard, considering the subject of
your presentation (e.g. recommending a strategy, presenting a report etc.),
helps you to select one of its built in ‘Content presentations’. The
selected presentation will have a worked ‘outline’ with slides having basic
design, colour scheme, sample titles and dummy text, which simply needs to be edited
by you.
Alternatively, you can choose one of the power point ‘Design
templates’ for your presentation (to use the ‘out line’ and ‘contents’
of totally your choice). These are pre-designed slide formats with a particular
color scheme and some accent graphics but without sample contents. Infact these
templates were prepared by experts from companies that have real life experience
in developing professional presentations. By using these templates properly, you
are assured of getting a professional and consistent look throughout your
presentation. If you desire, you can still modify the background or color scheme
of the selected template for part of or all the slides of your presentation. By
using ‘Presentations (Content templates)’ or ‘Presentation Designs (Design
templates)’, you definitely save time, because you don’t have to start from
a scratch.
The third option to prepare a presentation in power point programme is to
use ‘Blank presentation’ mode. You have to go for this, if you desire to do
most of the presentation design work, color scheme and graphics of your choice
and imagination.
Once the basic power point presentation is prepared, you can add
enhancement effects by creative application like adding to the presentation your
Institute logo, clipart, charts, photographic images and other visuals. Infact
in power point programme you can create variety of charts or graphs using built
in graphing facility (a shared application in M. S. Office). You can also import
an Excel spread sheet or graph. Addition of animation and sound effects are
still advanced features of power point programme, which when used can enhance
the presentation and keep the audience attentive.
Other presentation
software
‘Harvard graphics’ shares many features of
‘Power point’. You can create background image, choose color scheme, create
charts & graphs, organize the slides in the presentation and even prepare an
online slide show.
The ‘Corel draw’ is another optional package useful to draw free form
of graphics or objects, combine 2-3 cliparts to combine a new image and to make
changes to photographic images.
All these presentation applications which are now easily accessible, help
us to create interactive, self running or speaker controlled visual displays.
The visual impact adds power to the presentations as 50 percent of what we learn
comes from what we see (where as only 10 percent comes from what we hear). The
options and facilities available in these programmes can meet any creative
challenge you can see in your minds eye.
All said and done, the real power of these programmes comes with support
from a human presenter. Around 40 percent of what we learn usually comes from
the way the words are said!
**********************