Blog 2 Topic (EDUC 630)

PowerPoint is a powerful presentation software that is part of the Microsoft Office package.  The vast majority of the business and education world uses Microsoft Windows and Office.  Therefore, PowerPoint is the most widely used presentation software in American classrooms.  Since so many people use it, there are many examples of both good and bad presentations.  A great PowerPoint presentation has a limited amount of text on each, informative graphics, visually appealing layout, and smooth transitions.  A bad PowerPoint presentation is easy to spot.  Things like giant walls of text, awkward looking color schemes, overly abused slide animations, and too many meaningless pictures.  To create an effective PowerPoint, one should try to make use of text as efficiently as possible.  Concise text that conveys your basic point is more easily digested by the audience.  Stay away from colored text and backgrounds that clash to make for a horrible visual experience.  Limit the number of slide animations that you include.  A few well-placed animations can make your presentation look very sleek and professional, but overdoing it will give the impression that you are 12 years old and just discovered computers.  You should use appropriate pictures, graphs, and videos where it helps make your point.  Finally, try to keep the total number of slides to a minimum.  There is nothing worse than listening to a presentation, even a good one, and then noticing that the speaker is on slide 6 of 129!

There are some good alternatives to PowerPoint if you do not have access to it or simply want to try something different.  There is an open source version available as part of Open Office.  Adobe Presenter is another good alternative.  If you want to have absolute control of your presentation beyond the capabilities of PowerPoint, then you can use LaTeX.  LaTeX takes a significant amount of time to learn and is more similar to programing than the easy visual format of PowerPoint.  However, the end result of a well-designed LaTeX presentation is second to none!