6.1 Presentation and Design Essentials

Presentations are used in business to communicate information to both internal and external stakeholders. They are typically used to educate or train, sell an idea, or simply convey information to others.
Understanding your audience should drive the purpose behind the presentation. This is to ensure the presentation is geared toward the audience.
Consistency and coherency are essential for creating a professional, finished presentation. Consistency means ensuring that the presentation has a unified look and feel. Coherency means that the presentation is logically unified and applies to both the slides and the presenter.
It is important to create a plan or storyboard of the presentation, in the same way that it is important to outline an essay. A visual plan can ensure all key topics are covered and laid out in an effective manner.

6.2 Designing a Presentation in Microsoft PowerPoint

The default upon opening a new PowerPoint presentation starts with a blank slide. You can also open an existing document or start from a template.
Themes and templates can help create dynamic slides and slideshows. They can also help you save time by applying color palettes and layouts to an entire presentation.
The Home tab enables users to create new slides, add text, choose layouts, and customize paragraphs.
The Design tab enables users to select a common theme for slides and apply variants to each style.
The View tab helps users to better understand how different view options can be used to build and review presentation content.

Adjusting the layout of the elements on a slide is an important skill. Formatting the layout includes arranging the text, graphics, and other objects on a slide.
Design principles provide guidelines and rules of thumb to consider as users start to change and manipulate themes and layouts on slides.

When including data on slides or related text elements, tables can be used to neatly organize the information in a presentation. The Table tool is similar to inserting tables in Word.
An impactful presentation includes visual elements such as images rather than just text. You can use images from your computer, images provided by PowerPoint, or images you find online.
The written (textual) information on a slide can be used to convey important details. However, keeping text to a minimum on each slide makes for a more effective presentation design.
Symbols and equations can be easily inserted into slides when mathematical content is needed.
You can use the WordArt tool to enhance basic textual information by adding borders, shading effects, and other elements.
Slides that include several visual elements are often more appealing. Using the tools in the Illustrations command group, you can insert shapes, pictures, and SmartArt into your slides.

Both Slides and PowerPoint have similar functionality when creating presentations. In some respects, Slides is considered more user friendly, with enhanced collaboration tools.
Slides is a web-based program, which has both advantages and disadvantages. One advantage is that you can access your Slides files anywhere as long as you have internet access and access to your Google account.
Slides can be exported to a PowerPoint file format, and vice versa. This is useful when working in a workplace environment where one program is preferred over the other.

You can modify text in Slides either by using the action bar or using the Format menu.
You can adjust the spacing of text on a slide in Google with the Align & Indent tool or the Line spacing tool found in the Format menu.
Borders and lines can be used to enhance the look of slide elements such as a list of information or images. You can add borders using the Format menu.
The Arrange and Slide menus can be very helpful when finalizing your slides for a professional appearance. The tools in these menus help with lining up elements on the slide such as text boxes or images.

Images add visual interest to a presentation and enhance the audience’s understanding of the content.
Shapes can be used to create diagrams, highlight information, or add visual interest to a slide. They can also be used to create custom graphics or diagrams, or to illustrate a concept.
Tables can be used to organize and present data in a clear, concise manner.
Charts can be used to visualize data in a clear and meaningful way. Slides makes it simple to insert one into a presentation.
Diagrams can be used to represent complex ideas, processes, or relationships in a visual and understandable format.
Special characters can be used to add symbols, accents, or foreign characters to a slide.
Links allow you to quickly navigate to other pages or websites from within your presentation. They can also be used to provide additional information or resources, or to allow the audience to access additional content related to the presentation.
Adding video to your presentation can be a good way to add visual interest or provide a more immersive experience for the audience.