| Guidelines for a good presentation | Creating a simple slideshow | Running the slideshow |
| Preparing speaker notes | Altering slide bacground | Creating our own design |
Learning outcomes
On completion of this chapter you will
know:
- The rules for good presentation
- How to create slides in slide or outline view
- How to edit the master slide for consistent display
Introduction
PowerPoint is a software package for
creating slides to
- accompany a talk or lecture
- use as a standalone teaching aid
- tell a story
- advertise
products or services.
Its original and still most common use is
to create simple slides to accompany a talk and as such it has a number of
facilities such as printing out slide content as handouts and creating speaker
notes. The slides themselves can be
either printed on acetate sheets for display on an overhead projector or they
can be projected directly on to a screen from a datashow
projector.
With its inbuilt animation and speech
recording facilities PowerPoint can be used to produce animated standalone
teaching units in the same style as educational programs screened on public
television.
Digital or scanned photographs can be
imported into the slide show to tell the story of a special occasion such as a
cultural festival, a bride price ceremony or a sporting event.
In this book we shall look at how to use
PowerPoint for all of those goals. We
shall first, however, look at a few guidelines for creating a basic no-frills
presentation and then creating the presentation itself and producing
accompanying notes.
Guidelines
for creating a good presentation
·
Clarity of text
-
Text is at its clearest when
there is the greatest contrast between the foreground colour
of the text and the background colour. Black and white produce
the greatest contrast and thus the best colour scheme
is black text against a white background.
·
Be consistent with fonts and
styles
-
Use a maximum of two fonts for
each page – one for the heading and one for the main text. The heading font should be larger than that
of the main text
-
Always use fonts that are easy
to read. Times new Roman and Arial are among the easiest.
-
Bold text is easier to read
than normal
-
Italic text is less easy to
read
·
Backgrounds
-
Any coloured
or patterned background reduces the colour contrast
of the slide – thus reducing legibility
-
If presentation is to be
presented using acetate slides then coloured backgrounds
should be avoided
-
If using background ensure all
slides in the presentation have the same background. Backgrounds are to be altered only to emphasise a major shift or alteration in the topic.
Creating
a simple slide show
The first step in creating a presentation –
simple or otherwise – is to run PowerPoint. PowerPoint may create a blank
presentation for us. If not then we
click on File/New. Here we double
click on Blank Presentation. Either
way we get a display as shown in Figure 1‑1
Figure 1‑1
This shows a window with three panels in
it. The largest panel shows a preview of
what the slide looks like. Since we have
only just created the new presentation there is no text in any of the slides
and thus the two text boxes on the slide simply have user instructions in them.
The second panel which takes up the left
hand side of the window is used for giving us an overall view of our slide presentation. It has two tabs in it, Outline and Slides. In Slides
view it shows us, in miniature form, a number of the slides in the presentation
as shown in Figure 1‑2
below.
Figure 1‑2
On the other hand, if we switch to the Outline tab, we see the text of our
presentation as if it was an outline bulleted list in Word.
Figure
1‑3
The text for the presentation can be
entered directly into each slide, or it can be entered as a bulleted list into
the Outline tab.
Entering presentation text into individual slides
To enter text directly into each slide you
first create a slide. To do this you
select the Home tab and click on the
icon New Slide. This displays a drop down list as shown in Figure
1‑4.
Figure 1‑4
Of the options available here, the ones
that interest us most are the first two on the top row. The first one, Title Slide, is the design for the first slide of the
presentation. Here we have space for a
main title and a subtitle if required.
It would be equivalent to the title page of a book. The second option, Title and Content, is where the body of the text of the presentation
will appear. The heading for the slide
will appear at the top and the main text at the bottom.
To enter the title we simply click inside
the title box and enter the appropriate text.
Similarly to enter the main text we click on that box and enter the text
there. Once we have entered all of the
text for the slide we are working on we insert another new slide and proceed as
before.
Entering presentation text through the Outline tab
This is the easiest way of entering
presentation text especially if we are copying the text from another text
processing document such as Word etc.
All we need to do is to use outline bulleting on the text. In this case each slide title is the top
level of the outline and the main text is the second level.
Running
the slideshow
Running the slideshow is extremely simple, just click on the tab Slide Show and then either on the icon From the Beginning or From
current Slide. Instead of this we can simply press F5. An example of the
show is shown in Figure 1‑5.
Figure 1‑5
Although we earlier advocated simplicity in
slide design we have still to admit that Figure 1‑5 looks
somewhat bare and uninteresting. A way
of overcoming this is to add dividing lines between the title and the main
text.
We could, of course, add lines to each
individual slide but this would be a tedious job if we had a large number of
slides in our presentation. The best
method is to use the Master slide. On
the Master slide we put whatever we wish to appear on every single slide of our
presentation. In order to get to this
Master we select the tab View and
click on the icon Slide master. This gives us the view shown in Figure
1‑6
Figure 1‑6
Here we draw two lines between the title
box and the main text box. To draw lines
we go to the Insert tab and click on
the icon Shapes. This gives us a dropdown list of various
shape types. From this list we select a line tool. Using this we draw two lines as shown in Figure
1‑6. The lines would look better if one of them
was thicker than the other. To do this we right click on one of the lines and
from the pop up menu select Format Shape.
This gives us the dialogue box in Figure 1‑7
Figure 1‑7
WE select Line Style. Here we alter the Width
to 3pt and click on OK. (You may put the value higher or lower to suit your own
personal taste.)
While we are in the master slide we could
add the slide number to the slide. (This
is most useful if we are to print the slides onto acetate for display on an
overhead projector.) To do this we click
on the tab Insert and then on the
icon Header and Footer. This gives
us the dialogue box in Figure 1‑8. If
we check the box Slide number then
the number of each slide will appear in the lower right hand corner of each
slide. We could also have a footer on the slides and for this we check the box Footer. We then enter the footer text
and finally click on Apply to All.
Figure 1‑8
Once
we have accomplished this and again run our slideshow, we get a display as in Figure
1‑9.
Figure 1‑9
This is a much better presentation than
that of Figure 1‑5 since
the double lines clearly separate the two parts of the slide, the title part
and the main text part. The footer and
the slide number remind us of the overall topic and where we are in the
presentation without intruding on the main text of the slide.
Preparing speaker
notes
Speaker notes can be used for
- providing reminders to the speaker on points that has to be
used when elaborating on the text in the slide
- giving to the audience to take home as course notes
Creating them is very simple. For each slide that we wish to add notes to,
we simply select that slide and then in the panel reserved for speaker notes we
simply type in the notes. This is shown
in Figure 1‑10.
Figure 1‑10
Even if the presentation itself is to be
done via a datashow projector, the speaker notes
would be printed out for the presenter to refer to or duplicated to be
distributed to the audience. To print
the speaker notes we simply click on File/Print. This gives us the print dialogue box shown in
Figure 1‑11. From the pop up menu we select Notes pages and click on Print. Figure 1‑12 shows
an example of a notes page.
Figure 1‑11
Figure 1‑12
If, instead of giving the audience the full
notes attached to each slide, we wish to give them the text on the slides only,
then we can print that in almost the same way as the speaker notes. In the Print dialogue box in Figure
1‑11 we
select Handouts and then from the options
here Four Slides Horizontal. Figure
1‑13 below
shows the printout with 4 slides per page.
Figure 1‑13
Altering
the background
Although we have stressed earlier that a
simple black and white arrangement is the best option for the best clarity of
text, we should still explore the design templates that PowerPoint provides for
us. To do this we click on the tab Design.
Here in the group Themes we
have a large list of themes we can apply to our background.
Once we click on any one of the themes the
design of that theme is applied to all of the slides of the presentation. Figure
1‑14 below
shows one of the themes applied to our slides.
Notice that it has altered the text formatting of the presentation as
well as removing the lines we have used to separated the header from the main text.
Figure 1‑14
Creating
our own design
If the standard design templates that come
with the PowerPoint package don’t suit us we still can design our own. The advantage of this is that we can include
our organisation’s colour
and even our logo. Also different slides
can have different designs – although we should not go overboard with
this. To commence our design we select
the Design tab and click on the icon Background
Styles. From the drop down list we click on Format Background. This
gives us the box in Figure 1‑15
Figure 1‑15
Among the many options here we select a
picture. Once we have clicked the option
button we now click on the button File. This brings up an Open File dialogue box that
allows us to select the photograph we want to apply as a background. Once our photograph is imported we click on Apply to All. Figure
1‑16 shows
us what the slides now look like.
Figure 1‑16
Here most of our text is obscured by the
darker colour of the trees – leaving our slide
useless for proper presentation. Changing the font colour
to white would remedy this situation. To
do this we ensure that the Outline
view of the slides is active in the left hand panel. Next we select all of the text here. Now we
go to the Home tab and bring up the
font dialogue box shown in Figure 1‑17.
Figure 1‑17
Here we use Font color to select the colour we are going to use, and
then click on OK. If we now run our
slide show our presentation will appear as in Figure 1‑18.
Figure 1‑18
Further background designs
As well as using photographs as a
background we can still use the dialogue box of Figure
1‑15 for
creating other types of background:
·
Using single solid colour
·
Using gradients – one colour merging into another colour
·
A variety of patterns
It is worth experimenting with this
dialogue box to produce a variety of backgrounds for our presentation.
Remember, however, that slide backgrounds are subordinate to the text. Thus the
background must not detract from clarity of presentation.