This is application software used to create presentations, which can communicate ideas and other information to a group of audience. The presentation can be viewed as a slide show, which usually displays on a large monitor or projected screen.

OR

Presentation software refers to the software package used to display information, normally in form of a slide show

Some presentation software can convert an existing slide show into a format that can be accessed on the web.

The file extension for a presentation file is .ppt or .pptx

List the common examples of presentation software.

• org Impress.
• Corel presentations.
• Adobe (Aldus) Persuasion
• Apple Keynote.
• CustomShow
• Ease
• emaze
• Flowboard
• GnomePinpoint (open source)
• Google DocsHarvard Graphics
• Hewlett PackardBruno (software)
• Kingsoft Presentation
• Microsoft office PowerPoint.
• Harvard graphics. it was one of the first consumer applications software program that allowed the user to incorporate text
• IBM Lotus Freelance Graphics.
• Keynote(presentation software)

Applications of Presentation Software

1. Presenting learning materials to students in schools (CAL)
2. Presenting speeches and minutes in meeting
3. Used in training sessions
4. Used in presenting campaign manifestos
5. Used in conferences and seminars
6. Used in sales promotions to market products
7. Used in business shows, mobile kiosks and clinics

PRINCIPLES OF A GOOD PRESENTATION

When preparing a presentation, you must consider the following principles. This improves the quality of your presentation, makes it more effective and enjoyable and in the long run saves you time and effort.

• Simplicity of the presentation. The best slide is usually simple, easy and to the point. The audience may need more time to understand complicated slides while time is always limited during presentations.
• Know the audience and their expectations in order to give the right message to the right people. e.g. are they children, matures or a mixture. Are they clients or seniors of the organisation
• Relevance of the content. Ensure that the content of your slides is relevant to the topic of discussion in order to capture the attention of the audience
• Use of images, graphics and diagrams. Slides are visual aid to help you explain complex ideas in an easy way. Therefore, use the right and relevant images, graphics and charts to represent your ideas visually.
• Make the right choice of colours, font styles, font sizes, transitions, animations, links which suit the viewers

Advantages of Presentation Software

1. Presentation software usually provides a wide variety of presentation formats and layouts for the slides.
2. Multimedia components such as clip art images, video clips and audio clips can be incorporated into slides.
3. The timing of the slides can be set so that the presentation automatically displays the next slide after a predetermined period of time.
4. Special transition effects can be applied between each slide
5. The presentation can normally be viewed and printed in different formats

FEATURES OF ELECTRONIC PRESENTATION SOFTWARE

1. Presentation. This is a PowerPoint file made up of a series of slides, audience hand-outs, speaker’s notes and outline among others.
2. Slide. Is an individual page of a presentation
3. A slide master. Is the top slide in a hierarchy of slides that stores information about the theme and slide layouts of a presentation, including the background colour, fonts, effects, placeholder sizes, and positioning.
4. A PowerPoint template. This contains layouts(layout: The arrangement of elements, such as title and subtitle text, lists, pictures, tables, charts, shapes, and movies, on a slide.), theme colours (theme colors: A set of colors that is used in a file.

Theme colors, theme fonts, and theme effects compose a theme.), theme fonts (theme fonts: A set of major and minor fonts that is applied to a file. Theme fonts, theme colors, and theme effects compose a theme.), theme effects (theme effects:

A set of visual attributes that is applied to elements in a file. Theme effects, theme colors, and theme fonts compose a theme.), background styles, and even content.

1. Animation. Refers to special effects for introducing text in a slide during a slide show.
2. Placeholder. Placeholders are the containers in layouts that hold such content as text (including body text, bulleted lists, and titles), tables, charts, SmartArt graphics, movies, sounds, pictures, and clip art(clip art: A single piece of ready-made art, often appearing as a bitmap or a combination of drawn shapes.).
3. Transition effects. This refers to different styles in which slides come and leave the screen during a presentation.

Slide transition is a special effect for introducing an entire slide during a slide show

8. Graphics. A general term used to mean pictures, images, charts, photo, tables, etc., that you can add to a presentation
9. ClipArt. A general term for a library of pictures in the computer. Presenter’s notes, these contain ideas you want to discuss for each slide in your presentation.
10. Action buttons. Are ready-made buttons that can be inserted into your presentation. These enable you to perform actions upon clicking or moving mouse over them
11. Auto content wizard. This is a presentation wizard that contains data from which one can select and edit to create a personalized or customized presentation.
12. Slide layout. Slide layouts contain formatting, positioning, and placeholders for all the content that appears on a slide. Layout contains the theme (colors (theme colors: A set of colors that is used in a file.

Theme colors, theme fonts, and theme effects compose a theme.), fonts (theme fonts: A set of major and minor fonts that is applied to a file. Theme fonts, theme colors, and theme effects compose a theme.), effects (theme effects: A set of visual attributes that is applied to elements in a file.

Theme effects, theme colors, and theme fonts compose a theme.), and the background) of a slide.

Master layout is a term applied to a presentation’s overall design.

13. Timing. Is a technique by which slides or text appearing on the screen during a presentation, i.e. on mouse click or automatically after a defined period?

POWER-POINT BASICS

PowerPoint is an application for creating presentations that can be output as 35mm slides, Paper overheads, directly from the computer monitor, or Printed as handouts or speaker notes.

Microsoft PowerPoint is a commercial presentation application written and distributed by Microsoft for Microsoft Windows and Mac OS X. The current versions at the time of writing this tutorial are 2010 for Microsoft Windows and 2011 for Mac OS X.

Microsoft PowerPoint is a presentation tool that supports text, shapes, graphics, pictures and multimedia along with integration with other Microsoft Office products like Excel.

By default, documents saved in PowerPoint 2010 are saved with the .pptx extension whereas, the file extension of the prior PowerPoint versions is .ppt.

POWER POINT VIEWS

Normal view. Is a Tri-pane window that provides the text outline of the entire presentation on the left, the current slide on the upper-right, and speaker’s notes on the lower-right. This is the default PowerPoint view

1. Outline view. This enables one to edit and display all presentation text in one location instead of one slide at a time. It appears without the objects or images in the slide.
2. Slide view. Shows a graphic view of the current slide for editing and viewing
3. Slide sorter view. This displays the entire presentation so that one can add, delete and move slide.
4. Notes page. Provides a large area to view or type speaker’s notes on a slide
5. Slide show. Is a collection of slides moving in a defined sequence at a present timing that one can control and change with special effects.

PowerPoint supports multiple views to allow users to gain the maximum from the features available in the program. Each view supports a different set of functions and is designed accordingly.

PowerPoint views can be accessed from two locations.

• Views can be accessed quickly from the bottom bar just to the left of the zoom settings.

• Views can also be accessed from the Presentation Views section in the View ribbon

Here is a short description of the various views and their features.

Normal View

This is the default view in PowerPoint and this is primarily used to create and edit slides. You can create/ delete/ edit/ rearrange slides, add/ remove/ modify content and manipulate sections from this view.

Slide Sorter View

This view is primarily used to sort slides and rearrange them. This view is also ideal to add or remove sections as it presents the slides in a more compact manner making it easier to rearrange them.

Reading View

This view is new to PowerPoint 2010 and it was created mainly to review the slideshow without losing access to rest of the Windows applications.

Typically, when you run the slideshow, the presentation takes up the entire screen so other applications cannot be accessed from the taskbar.

In the reading view the taskbar is still available while viewing the slideshow which is convenient. You cannot make any modifications when on this view.

Slides Show

This is the traditional slideshow view available in all the earlier versions of PowerPoint. This view is used to run the slideshow during presentation.

In this unit, we will understand how to get started with PowerPoint 2010. We will understand how to start PowerPoint 2010 application in simple steps.

To access PowerPoint 2010, you must have Microsoft Office 2010 installed in your PC. Only Office 2010 Home and Student, Home and Business, Standard, Professional and Professional Plus packages have PowerPoint included in them.

Step 1 − Click the Start button.

Step 2 − Click All Programs option from the menu.

Step 3 − Search for Microsoft Office from the sub menu and click it.

Step 4 − Search for Microsoft PowerPoint 2010 from the submenu and click it.

This will launch the Microsoft PowerPoint 2010 application and you will see the following presentation window.

The following screenshot shows the various areas in a standard PowerPoint file. It is important to familiarize yourself with these areas as it makes learning and using PowerPoint easier.

File Tab

This tab opens the Backstage view which basically allows you to manage the file and settings in PowerPoint. You can save presentations, open existing ones and create new presentations based on blank or predefined templates. The other file related operations can also be executed from this view.

Ribbon

The ribbon contains three components −

• Tabs − They appear across the top of the Ribbon and contain groups of related commands. Home, Insert, Page Layout are examples of ribbon tabs.
• Groups − They organize related commands; each group name appears below the group on the Ribbon. For example, a group of commands related to fonts or a group of commands related to alignment, etc.
• Commands − Commands appear within each group as mentioned above.

Title Bar

This is the top section of the window. It shows the name of the file followed by the name of the program which in this case is Microsoft PowerPoint.

Slide Area

This is the area where the actual slide is created and edited. You can add, edit and delete text, images, shapes and multimedia in this section.

Help

The Help Icon can be used to get PowerPoint related help anytime you need. Clicking on the “?” opens the PowerPoint Help window where you have a list of common topics to browse from. You can also search for specific topics from the search bar at the top.

Zoom Options

The zoom control lets you zoom in for a closer look at your text. The zoom control consists of a slider that you can slide left or right to zoom in or out, you can click on the – and + buttons to increase or decrease the zoom factor.

The maximum zoom supported by PowerPoint is 400% and the 100% is indicated by the mark in the middle.

Slide Views

The group of four buttons located to the left of the Zoom control, near the bottom of the screen, lets you switch between PowerPoint views.

• Normal Layout view − This displays page in normal view with the slide on the right and a list of thumbnails to the left. This view allows you to edit individual slides and also rearrange them.
• Slide Sorter view − This displays all the slides as a matrix. This view only allows you to rearrange the slides but not edit the contents of each slide.
• Reading View − This view is like a slideshow with access to the Windows task bar in case you need to switch windows. However, like the slideshow you cannot edit anything in this view.

Notes Section

This sections allows you to add notes for the presentation. These notes will not be displayed on the screen during the presentation; these are just quick reference for the presenter.

Quick Access Toolbar

The Quick Access Toolbar is located just under the ribbon. This toolbar offers a convenient place to group the most commonly used commands in PowerPoint. You can customize this toolbar to suit your needs.

Slide Tab

This section is available only in the Normal view. It displays all the slides in sequence. You can add, delete and reorder slides from this section.

PowerPoint offers a host of tools that will aid you in creating a presentation. These tools are organized logically into various ribbons in PowerPoint. The table below describes the various commands you can access from the different menus.

Besides these depending on the objects selected in the slide, there are other menu tabs that get enabled.

Here are the steps that allow you to insert a new slide in the deck −

Step 1 − Right-click in the Navigation Pane under any existing slide and click on the New Slide option.

Step 2 − The new slide is inserted. You can now change the layout of this slide to suit your design requirements.

Step 3 − To change the slide layout, right-click on the newly inserted slide and go to the Layout option where you can choose from the existing layout styles available to you.

You can follow the same steps to insert a new slide in between existing slides or at the end on the slide list.

When we insert a new slide, it inherits the layout of its previous slide with one exception. If you are inserting a new slide after the first slide (Title slide), the subsequent slide will have the Title and Content layout.

You will also notice that if you right-click in the first step without selecting any slide the menu options you get are different, although you can insert a new slide from this menu too.

PowerPoint allows users to add text to the slide in a well-defined manner to ensure the content is well distributed and easy to read. The procedure to add the text in a PowerPoint slide is always the same – just click in the text box and start typing.

The text will follow the default formatting set for the text box, although this formatting can be changed later as required. What changes is the different kinds of content boxes that support text in a PowerPoint slide.

Given below are some of the most common content blocks you will see in PowerPoint.

Title Box

This is typically found on slides with the title layout and in all the slides that have a title box in them. This box is indicated by “Click to add title“.

Subtitle Box

This is found only in slides with the Title layout. This is indicated by “Click to add subtitle“

Content Box

This is found in most of the slides that have a placeholder for adding content. This is indicated by “Click to add text“. As you can see, this box allows you to add text as well as non-text content.

To add text to such a box, click anywhere on the box, except on one of the content icons in the center and start typing.

Text Only Box

This is not a default content box available in PowerPoint, but you can create it using Slide Master, if required. This is also indicated by “Click to add text“. The only difference between the Text Only Box and the Content Box is that the former only supports text in the content area.

Most of the standard layouts come with the text box option. As mentioned in the previous chapter, text boxes will have “Click to add text” as the default text. Here are the steps to add new text boxes in slide.

Step 1 − Click on the Text Box icon in the Home ribbon under the Drawing section.

Step 2 − You will get the insert text box cursor that looks like an inverted cross.

Step 3 − Click to insert a text box. You can now start typing directly into the text box.

Step 4 − Alternately, you can click and drag the cursor without releasing the click to create a text box.

The size of the text box can be adjusted by selecting one of the edges marked by squares or corners marked by circles.