Presentation is the practice of showing and explaining the content of a topic to an audience or learner. A presentation is a set of visuals prepared using special-purpose software. Creating a presentation in PowerPoint involves starting with a basic design; adding new slides and content; choosing slide layouts; modifying slide design, and creating effects such as animated slide transitions.
A slide is a page in a PowerPoint document.
A slide layout (or slide type) is the arrangement of placeholders on a blank slide in preparation for a combination of a title, text and content. Content includes tables, images, media clips, WordArt and organisation charts and other graphic elements.
A design template is a file that contains the styles in a presentation, including the type and size of bullets and fonts; placeholder sizes and positions; background design and fill colour schemes.
PowerPoint provides design templates that you can apply to a presentation to give it a fully designed, professional look.
Slide transitions are the visual movements as one slide changes to another.
In PowerPoint, animations are visual effects applied to individual items on the slide such as graphics, titles or bullet points, rather than to the slide itself.
A PowerPoint window in Normal view showing
(a) Outline tab;
(b) slide pane;
(c) notes area;
(d)drawing toolbar;
(e) task pane
PowerPoint has three main views:
Normal view is the main editing view, which you use to write and design your presentation. It is also commonly known as Slide view. The view has three working areas: on the left, tabs that alternate between an outline of your slide text (Outline tab) and your slides displayed as thumbnails (Slides tab); on the right, the slide pane, which displays a large view of the current slide; and on the bottom, the notes pane.
•Slide Sorter view is an exclusive view of your slides in thumbnail form. When you are finished creating and editing your presentation, Slide Sorter gives you an overall picture of it – making it easy to reorder, add or delete slides and preview your transition and animation effects.
Slide Show view takes up the full computer screen, like an actual slide show presentation. In this full-screen view, you see your presentation the way your audience will. You can see how your graphics, timings, movies, animated elements and transition effects will look in the actual show.
There are four types of text you can add to a slide:
• placeholder text;
• text in an AutoShape;
• text in a text box;
• WordArt text.
PowerPoint allows you to insert a wide range of images directly into your presentation, including:
• pictures:
• Windows Enhanced Metafile;
• Windows Metafile;
• JPEG;
• Portable Network Graphics;
• clip art;
• screenshots;
• photo albums.