In today’s article, we will consider in detail how to make presentation, what problems arise in the process, and what you should pay attention to. Let’s analyze some subtleties and tricks when writing presentations.
In general, what is a professional presentation? We would give a simple definition – this is a brief visual representation of the information, which helps the speaker to reveal the essence of his or her work in more detail. Now they are used not only by businessmen (as before), but also by ordinary students and schoolchildren, and generally in many spheres of our lives!
As a rule, the presentation consists of several sheets, on which images, diagrams, tables, and a brief description are presented. So, let’s begin to understand all this in detail.
What Is Necessary to Make Presentation?
The main program for making presentations is Microsoft PowerPoint (moreover, it is set on most computers, as it comes bundled together with Word and Excel). Next you need quality material: text, pictures, sounds, maybe video. Let us briefly touch on the topic of how to find all of this material.
Text. It is the best option if you are knowledgeable in the presentation theme and can write text from personal experience. Such a presentation will be unique and interesting for listeners. However, this option is not suitable for everyone.
You can use only books, especially if you have a good collection on your shelf. Text from books can be scanned and recognized, and then redone into Word format. If you do not have books, or few, you can use electronic libraries.
In addition to books, abstracts may be a good option, perhaps even those that you wrote yourself and submitted earlier. You can use the popular sites from the catalog. If you collect a few interesting essays on the right topic, you can make a great presentation.
It is not superfluous to simply look for articles on the Internet on various forums, blogs, websites. Very often, you can come across with excellent materials.
Pictures, schemes, graphics. Of course, the most interesting material would be your personal photos that you made while preparing for writing your presentation. However, you can find pictures on the Internet. Moreover, you don’t always have time to make photos on your own.
Graphics and schemes can be done by yourself, if you have some regularities, or if you have calculated something via a formula. For example, for mathematics calculation, there is an interesting program for making graphics for a graph.
If you can’t find the required program, a graphic can be made manually: you can draw it in Excel, or just on a sheet of paper, and then make a photo or scan it. There are many different methods.
Video. Making a video is not an easy task, and it requires money. Not everyone can buy a camera: moreover, you need to edit the video properly. But if you have such an opportunity, you should use it. But let’s talk about a situation where you don’t have a camera.
If you can compromise on the quality of the video, you can use your phone to make a video. You can make a video to show in detail a particular thing which is difficult to describe via a picture. By the way, many popular things have been shot already, and you can find them on YouTube.
One more interesting method to make a video is to record it from the monitor of your computer, and you can add sounds – for example, you can add a recording of your voice which describes what is happening in the video. So, if you have everything that is mentioned above, you can start to make your professional presentation.
Making the Presentation in PowerPoint
Before we talk about the technical part of making a presentation, we should talk about the plan of the presentation.
Plan your presentation. It doesn’t matter how beautiful your presentation is – without your speech, it is only a set of pictures and text. Therefore, before you start to make it, you should deal with the plan of your speech.
First of all, who will be listeners of your speech? What are their interests, what would they like the most? Sometimes, the success of the presentation depends not on the fullness of information, but what you focus attention on.
Secondly, define the main purpose of your presentation. What does it prove or disprove? Perhaps it talks about some methods or events, your personal experience, etc. One should not include different directions in one report. Immediately decide on the concept of your speech, and think about what you will say at the beginning and at the end – and, accordingly, what slides and with what information you need.
Thirdly, most of the speakers cannot correctly calculate the time of their report. If you are given very little time, then making a huge presentation with video and sounds has almost no sense. The listeners will not even have time to view it! It is much better to make a small presentation, and place the rest of the material in another article and everyone who is interested can copy it.
Create, delete, and work with slides. I think the best way to understand how everything works is to create a presentation by showing each action with screenshots and describing each step.
Usually, the first thing you do when you start working on a presentation is adding slides (i.e. pages that contain text and graphic information). You can make it simply: launch PowerPoint and click “home / create a slide.” By the way, you can delete slides (click the desired slide in the column on the left and press the DEL key, move, swap between each other – via the mouse).
As we have already noticed, the slide can be very simple: just the title and the text under it. To be able, for example, to place text in two columns (it’s easy to compare objects with this arrangement), you can change the layout of the slide. In order to work with slides properly and to make a good presentation, you should also know presentation techniques. Check out other posts on our blog that tell how to learn them, for example, What Is a Presentation and How to Complete It.