Ressources Powerpoint

2. What Is A PowerPoint Presentation?

This unit teaches the basic uses of that interface as well as providing an overview of what a PowerPoint presentation actually is. This is intended as grounding for beginners before proceeding to the more advanced units.

Speaker Support

Originally, presentations were mainly created as visual aids for some sort of talk or lecture delivered by a speaker. Before portable computers became commonplace, slides were real slides – either photographically produced 35mm film slides used with a projector, or transparent ‘foils’ laid on an overhead projector. Now that we have notebooks and data projectors, such presentations are almost invariably delivered directly from a presentation application such as PowerPoint.

Using a computer rather than a photographic slide or print out means that presentations can much more easily include different types of content such as sounds, transitions, animations and videos.

With the increased capabilities of computer-based presentations, the human speaker is no longer essential. Presentations can be designed to run unattended – either revolving endlessly or with some user interaction – and they can also serve as documents in their own right (taking the place of a conventional text-based report).

The common element is that the presentation will generally be designed to convey information as clearly and persuasively as possible to an audience.

Slides

Where a Word document has pages and an Excel workbook has worksheets, a PowerPoint presentation has slides. A slide can just contain text, or can include pictures or one or more videos, or a combination of different types of content. Slides can start off as a completely blank canvas for you to place objects wherever you like or, more commonly, will have some background design and even common content such as an organisation’s logo and details.

Graphics

Because presentations are frequently delivered to large audiences the content tends to be less detailed than Word documents or Excel spreadsheets. Instead, graphics and effects are used to add impact. For this reason, Graphics are a far more significant component of PowerPoint than they are of Word or Excel for example. Of the default PowerPoint ribbon tabs, four are principally concerned with objects or effects:

• Insert
• Design
• Transitions
• Animations