Week 03 — Presentations
Evaluation
Up to 10 points can be gained towards your final score by completing the in-class assignment on Friday.
Preparation
1. Fix your MS PowerPoint settings
You should already have a copy of MS PowerPoint (PPT) installed on your computer.
Start it up (or activate the File menu if it is already running) and click on Options at the bottom of the page.
In the PowerPoint Options pop-up window, select the Language tab on the left and then under
Choose Display Language move English to the top of the list using the up and down arrows.
Using PPT in English will make it easier to follow the material in this class,
and will help you to improve your English faster.
2. Complete the self-preparation assignment at home before next class
Starting with a blank presentation, reproduce the document shown in the following videos. (These videos are also embedded at the end of this page, in case you prefer to watch them without leaving your browser.)
Substitute your own media – images, videos, etc. – for those shown in the sample document. I recommend you make ample use of the 'pause' button and follow along one step at a time.
You can download the actual sample document featured in the videos, if you think that would be helpful: 03-powerpoint_examples.pptx
3. Check your proficiency with PPT using the self-assessment questionnaire
- Answer each question in the self-assessment questionnaire as honestly as you can. (Do not press 'submit' when you are finished.)
- Check your scores.
- Revise those topics having the lowest scores.
- When you have made progress with understanding or skill, update your scores.
- Repeat from step 2 until you feel comfortable with most (or all) of the topics.
On Thursday evening, press 'submit'. In class on Friday we will check which topics were difficult for everyone.
To succeed at the in-class assignment for this class you should know how to
- create a new presentation with a proper title slide
- create normal sentences, bulleted lists, and numbered lists
- format words for emphasis (bold, italic, underline, special
font, unusual size) - use text boxes
- use different layouts
- create and fill in tables, charts, and smart art
- insert images and videos
- make internal and external links
- automatically number the slides
You can also use Internet search engines to find online tutorials and other educational materials relating to PPT, or even check our library to see if they have a book on the subject. In other words, use any resources you can to achieve your learning goals. At the same time, exercise judgement about good and bad advice you find online especially when it comes to choosing and organising the content of your slides. (You, and only you, know what content is needed and how best to present it. If you are unsure about choosing and presenting content, the best way to learn how to do that is by making lots of presentations and finding out for yourself what works and what does not work.)
What you will learn from this class
- How to create a basic presentation using PPT.
- How to make lists, tables, and charts to present information.
- How to use different layouts to organise content on the slide.
- How to indicate relationships visually using smart art and shapes.
- How to include media such as images and videos.
- How to put a running footer on your slides indicating slide number, date, your name, etc.
Further reading
Edward Tufte is a famous proponent of simplicity, clarity, and good design in printed media. His essay The Cognitive Style of PowerPoint is well worth reading and thinking about.1 While not everyone agrees with all of his points, his extreme position is a welcome counterbalance to the mass of bad advice that you will find elsewhere about how to construct an 'amazing' presentation in PPT. His essay offers few solutions to PowerPoint's problems, but a critical response by Jean-Luc Doumont entitled Slides Are Not All Evil does offer some practical advice (starting on page 68).
Remember also that PowerPoint slides are not the only way to create an effective presentation. For making traditional slides, several LaTeX packages are available. There are also web frameworks such as reveal.js with which you can make presentations that would be impossible in PPT. Breaking out of the 'slide' format entirely, I have seen an effective presentation made using a single (long) web page that the presenter simply scrolled through during his talk. Pick the right tool for the job.
1 This document was scanned to PDF with optical character recognition that failed in a handful of places. For example, in the fourth sentence, “2ist century” should be “21st century”.
Notes
PowerPoint is a program for preparing presentation support 'slides' that mimic the transparencies that were once used with overhead projectors. It is the de facto standard program for preparing slides used in business meetings.
An estimated 500,000,000 people use it regularly which means there is a huge amount of online help available for it.
One of the first Google results for ‘powerpoint help’ is a section on Microsoft's own web site called
PowerPoint help & learning that includes short tutorials on
getting started,
collaborating,
design,
animations
pictures and charts,
giving presentations, and
slides and text.
The PPT user interface is quite similar to Word. The following sections present a breadth-first tour of PPT's ribbon – the part of the user interface that most people interact with most often. Since many of the tool groups are identical to MS Word, we will concentrate here on those aspects that are different.
Home
The Slides group adds common operations performed on slides. The Drawing group gives quick access to some of the most commonly functions available in the tabs relating to shapes and images.
Insert
New for PPT are groups for Illustrations and Media.
Draw
Several groups relating to hand-drawn content. Maybe the most useful is the ability to highlight text in a way that looks hand-drawn.
Design
Many distracting Themes are available, taking up most of the ribbon space. Much more useful is the Customise group which contains the Slide Size tool, essential for making a poster or other non-presentation media.
Transitions
If you need them for a rare special effect, here they are along with sounds that can play when changing slides too. Of most use is the Timing group which provides the ability to automatically advance through a range of slides based on time delay instead of clicking a mouse or pressing a key.
Slide Show
Start Slide Show contains several tools for presenting in different ways. Some of the online presentation possibilities are powerful when used in conjunction with MS Teams. For example, the ability to show the presenter view on your screen while showing the actual slide as your shared 'screen' to other participants in the meeting.
Set up has tools to help perfect the timing of a presentation, as well as to record a video of yourself presenting the slides.
Monitors is where you will find the options relating to multiple monitors, which includes the projector which the computer considers as an external monitor. Use Presenter View does exactly what it says on the label, showing the audience only the current slide while you see the current slides, presenter's notes, a countdown timer, and a preview of the upcoming slide.
View
Presentation Views includes the Normal view which is the default and the one most people spend most time looking at, along with three others that are useful. Slide Sorter is a thumbnail view that uses the entire width of the window. Notes View is where you can edit the presenter's notes that will be shown only to you when using presenter mode. Reading View lets you see and interact with the slide as you will when it is actually presented. Essential for testing animations, etc.
Master Views is where you switch from editing the normal slide content to editing the Slide Master layouts that dictate how each 'empty' slide is initially set up. If you need to permanently move things around (e.g., to make the title space smaller) or introduce entirely new layouts, do it here on the master slides. (Note that switching to the master slide opens a hidden tab in the ribbon, but the tools it contains should now be familiar to you.) Modifying the layout of printed handouts or 'slides plus notes' is done from here too.
Practical advice for giving and preparing presentations
Incompatibilities happen. Some projectors don't like some computers. Some PPT files prepared on one OS do not play in PPT on another OS. In other words, there is no guarantee that your presentation will display at the venue. One way to insure against this is to take a PDF version of the slides, which should display properly from almost anyone's computer. (PDFs do not, in general, display animations. Using PDF as an insurance policy therefore has the additional benefit of discouraging the use of animations in the original slides.)
In the worst case nothing will display at the venue (or the projector will explode, or their will be a power cut, etc.). How well do you know your presentation and material? Could you present the entire talk without using any slides at all?
Printing some thumbnails of the slides can be a handy reference during a talk, both to know what is coming up and as a map to get to a specific slide quickly if someone asks a question.
Simple fonts are more legible than fancier fonts. (Highly decorated fonts, or those that simulate handwriting, have no place in a presentation.)
Not all fonts are available on all computers. Sticking to common fonts (Arial, Times New Roman) almost guarantees a presentation will look the same to everyone.
Contrast aids legibility and therefore the efficiency of communication and information transfer. Black and white have the best contrast of any pair of colours. Other pairs of colours can have good contrast, if chosen with great care.
Colours on a computer monitor are different to the colours produced by a projector. Checking the legibility of coloured information well before a presentation can avoid embarrassment during it. (I once met a projector that refused to admit the existence of 100% saturated green. I spent quite a few minutes of that talk helping the audience to imagine the missing parts of my diagrams. I have avoided pure green in my presentations ever since.)
Videos
These 14 videos cover all the essentials of PowerPoint (assuming you already know how to use MS Word) while not diving deeply into any one topic. Use them to understand what features are there, and then explore the full capabilities of the interesting or useful features in more depth on your own.
The sample document created in these videos is available here: 03-powerpoint_examples.pptx
| 1. Basic formatting, lists |
| 2. Layouts |
| 3. Tables |
| 4. Charts |
| 5. Smart art |
| 6. Shapes |
| 7. Images |
| 8. Diagrams |
| 9. Videos |
| 10. Animations, reveal |
| 11. Links |
| 12. Slide numbers |
| 13. Templates |
| 14. Hints and tips |
I made 14 × 1.5-minute videos (one per topic) instead of 2 × 10-minute videos (divided in half arbitrarily) or 1 × 20-minute video. I thought that would make the content easier to navigate. However, if you prefer fewer (but longer) videos then please tell me.