Presentation Tools

Presentation software is an application program used to build a sequence of screens, called slides, which a speaker displays to an audience while explaining a topic. The complete file containing all the slides is called a presentation, and people often refer to it informally as a deck.

It helps to place the three common office applications side by side. A word processor produces documents meant to be read closely and privately. A spreadsheet stores numbers in cells and calculates with them. Presentation software does neither job well, and it is not supposed to. Its purpose is to support a talk. The slides carry short, glanceable points; the speaker supplies the detail. That single idea is what an examiner wants first when a question asks for the purpose of presentation software.

The purposes you should be able to list are: to organise a topic into small, ordered units; to combine text with pictures, charts, tables, sound and video, which makes it a multimedia tool; to hold the attention of an audience; to keep the speaker on track using prepared speaker notes; to allow the same material to be edited and reused later; and to be printable as handouts so the audience can take something away.

Several packages do this job and their behaviour differs slightly, so a good answer should not describe only one product. Widely used ones include Microsoft PowerPoint, which is part of Microsoft Office; LibreOffice Impress and Apache OpenOffice Impress, which are free and open-source; Google Slides, which runs inside a web browser and keeps the file online; and WPS Presentation. The default file format differs too. PowerPoint normally saves a .pptx file, while Impress saves an .odp file, where ODP stands for OpenDocument Presentation. Most packages can open and save the other format as well, which is why a file made at home usually opens in the school lab.

All of these are GUI (Graphical User Interface) programs, and they are WYSIWYG — What You See Is What You Get — meaning the slide you edit on screen looks the same as the slide your audience finally sees.

Typical situations in which a Class 9 student meets presentation software: a morning assembly talk on road safety; a science project on the water cycle; a social science report on the Constitution of India; a bank branch explaining UPI (Unified Payments Interface) safety rules to customers. In every case somebody is speaking while an audience looks at a screen.

A finished presentation can be delivered in more than one way. It can be projected in a room, shown on a large television, shared in an online class, exported as a PDF (Portable Document Format) file so that anyone can open it without the original software, or printed as handouts and notes pages. It can even be set to run by itself, on a loop, at a science-fair stall.

One caution examiners test: presentation software is not a calculator. You may place a chart or a table of figures on a slide, but the arithmetic is normally done in a spreadsheet and the result brought across.

A slide is a single screen or page of a presentation. Slides are numbered and shown in order, though that order can be changed at any time and can even be jumped about during the show.

A layout is a ready-made arrangement of content boxes on a slide. When you insert a new slide, most packages ask which layout you want. Common layouts, whatever the vendor calls them, are: Title Slide for the opening slide; Title and Content for an ordinary bullet slide; Two Content or Comparison for two columns side by side; Title Only; Picture with Caption; and Blank. Choosing a layout saves time and, more importantly, keeps every slide in the deck aligned the same way.

A placeholder is one of the boxes supplied by the layout. On an empty slide a placeholder appears as a dotted or hatched rectangle with prompt text inside it, such as Click to add title. That prompt text never appears in the slide show; it disappears the moment you type, and an untouched placeholder is simply not displayed to the audience.

This is where examiners set their trap. A placeholder comes from the layout and the slide master, so its position, font and size are already decided and stay consistent across the deck; it also feeds the outline. A text box is drawn by hand wherever you like, is not part of the layout, does not appear in the outline, and does not automatically follow the master formatting. Rule of thumb for the paper: placeholders are provided, text boxes are drawn.

Building the deck itself is straightforward. A new slide is added from the New Slide command; an existing slide can be duplicated when the next slide is nearly the same; a slide can be deleted, moved by dragging its thumbnail, or hidden so that it stays in the file but is skipped during the show. Larger decks can often be split into named sections so that a twenty-slide project report stays manageable.

Typing text is fastest in outline form, where you see only the titles and bullet levels. A short project outline looks like this:

Water Conservation in India      <- slide title
    Why it matters               <- level 1 bullet
        Rainfall is seasonal     <- level 2 bullet
        Groundwater is falling
What schools can do              <- next slide title
    Rainwater harvesting
    Repair leaking taps

Pressing Tab (or the Demote command) pushes a line to a lower bullet level; Shift+Tab (Promote) pulls it back up. Levels matter because the master gives each level its own font size and bullet symbol automatically.

Three small features complete the picture. Slide numbers, a date and a footer can be switched on for the whole deck at once, usually from an Insert menu; they are normally left off the title slide. The slide size or aspect ratio is set for the whole presentation, commonly 16:9 for a widescreen projector or 4:3 for an older one — changing it later rescales or crops content you have already placed, so decide first.

A view is simply a way of displaying the same presentation on screen so that a particular job becomes easy. Changing the view never changes the content of the file. Most packages keep the view commands on a View menu or tab and repeat the important ones as small icons near the bottom right of the window.

Normal view is the working view and the one you spend most time in. A large editing pane shows the current slide, a narrow panel down one side shows thumbnails of all slides, and a strip below the slide holds the speaker notes. You type, format, insert pictures and position objects here.

Outline view strips everything away except the slide titles and the text typed in text placeholders. It is the fastest way to draft or restructure the wording of a talk, because you can promote, demote and drag whole blocks of text without touching design. Remember the consequence: text typed in a hand-drawn text box will not show up here.

Slide sorter view shows every slide as a small thumbnail in a grid, like photographs on a table. You cannot edit the words on a slide here, but you can see the flow of the whole talk at a glance and you can reorder, copy, duplicate, delete or hide slides by dragging and clicking. Transition and timing information is usually shown under each thumbnail, so this is also the quickest place to apply a transition to many slides. If a question says which view lets you rearrange the sequence of slides, the answer is slide sorter view.

Notes page view shows one slide reduced to the top half of a printed page with a large box underneath for the speaker notes. Notes are the sentences you want to say but do not want the audience to read. This view exists mainly so you can format and print those notes properly.

Reading view, which PowerPoint provides and not every package does, shows the presentation like a slide show but inside the application window, keeping small navigation controls. It is meant for checking your own work without taking over the whole screen.

Slide show view is the delivery view: the slide fills the entire screen, menus and toolbars vanish, and animations and transitions actually play. In most packages the show starts from the first slide with F5 and from the current slide with Shift+F5, and Esc ends it, though shortcuts do vary between products and versions.

Where two screens are connected, many packages offer presenter view. The projector shows only the slide, while the speaker sees the same slide plus the next slide, the speaker notes and a timer. This is worth one clean sentence in an answer about running a show.

Finally there are the master views — slide master, handout master and notes master — which are covered later in this chapter. They are views too, but they edit the design behind the slides rather than the slides themselves.

A useful revision habit is to match a job to a view: draft the words in outline, build the slides in normal, rearrange in slide sorter, write what you will say in notes page, check quietly in reading view, and deliver in slide show.

Text is normally typed straight into a placeholder. The formatting commands are the same family you met in a word processor: font face (the typeface, such as Calibri or Liberation Sans), font size measured in points where one point is 1/72 of an inch, bold, italic, underline, font colour, alignment (left, centre, right, justified), bullets and numbering, line spacing and indent level. Two extras belong to slides in particular: text can be made to shrink automatically so that it still fits the placeholder, and WordArt-style decorative text effects are available in most packages. Use decorative text sparingly — a projector at the back of a hall is unforgiving.

Images can be inserted from a file on disk, from an online picture search built into the software, or from a screenshot. Common formats are JPEG and PNG for photographs and screenshots, GIF for simple animation, and SVG for line drawings; JPEG, PNG and GIF are raster (made of pixels, so they blur when enlarged) while SVG is vector (drawn from equations, so it stays sharp at any size). Three handling rules matter in the exam: resize using a corner handle, because dragging a side handle distorts the picture; use crop to remove unwanted edges rather than covering them with a shape; and compress images if the file becomes too large to e-mail. Adding alternative text to a picture describes it for a screen reader, which is a small but real accessibility habit.

Shapes, arrows, icons, sound clips and video clips are inserted in the same way. Objects can be layered (bring to front, send to back), aligned, grouped so that several move as one, and rotated.

Charts turn numbers into a picture. When you insert a chart, most packages open a small datasheet or a linked spreadsheet where you type the figures, and the chart on the slide updates as you type. Choosing the right chart type is the part that carries marks:

Data                                     Best chart
Canteen sales for Mon-Sat (in rupees)    Column or bar chart
Share of a monthly budget of Rs 2000     Pie chart
Rainfall across twelve months            Line chart
Height plotted against age               XY (scatter) chart

A column or bar chart compares separate items, a line chart shows a trend over time, a pie chart shows parts of one whole and therefore uses a single data series, its slices together making up the whole (100 per cent), and a scatter chart shows the relationship between two numeric quantities. Every chart should carry a chart title, labelled axes where relevant, and a legend when more than one series is plotted; data labels can print the exact value on each bar or slice.

Tables suit exact values that must be read individually — a timetable, a price list, a marks statement. You insert a table by giving the number of rows and columns, then type, moving from cell to cell with Tab. Cells can be merged or split, rows and columns inserted or deleted, and a header row given its own shading. Keep slide tables small: more than about six rows becomes unreadable on a projector, and such data belongs in a handout.

Content prepared elsewhere can be brought in by copy and paste. Under OLE (Object Linking and Embedding), an embedded object becomes part of the presentation file and no longer changes when the original changes, while a linked object stays connected to the source file and updates when that file is edited — but it breaks if the source is moved or renamed.

A slide transition is the visual effect that plays while one slide is replaced by the next. It belongs to the slide as a whole. Typical effects are fade, wipe, push, cover, dissolve and, in newer packages, a morph-style effect that moves matching objects smoothly from one slide to the next. Because a transition describes how a slide arrives, a slide can carry only one transition at a time; applying a second replaces the first.

The settings offered with a transition are similar everywhere. You choose the effect, sometimes an effect option such as the direction of a wipe, a duration in seconds, an optional sound, and how the slide advances: On mouse click, or automatically after a stated number of seconds, or both. An Apply to All button copies the chosen transition to every slide in one step, which is exactly what a well-behaved presentation should do.

An animation is an effect applied to an object on a single slide — a title, a bullet list, a picture, a shape, a chart or a table. Animations fall into four families, and knowing the names is worth a mark:

• Entrance — the object appears (appear, fly in, fade in, zoom).
• Emphasis — the object is already on screen and draws attention to itself (grow, spin, change colour).
• Exit — the object leaves the slide (fly out, fade out).
• Motion path — the object travels along a drawn path across the slide.

Each animation also has a start setting, and this is where careless answers lose marks. On Click waits for the presenter to click. With Previous begins at the same moment as the animation before it, so the two play together. After Previous begins automatically as soon as the previous one finishes, with no click. A delay and a duration can be set for each effect, and an animation pane lists every effect on the slide in order so that you can drag them into a different sequence.

Text can be animated as one object, by paragraph (so bullets appear one at a time, which is the common classroom use), or in some packages by word or by letter. Charts can be animated by series or by category so that a column chart builds up bar by bar.

Now the comparison examiners actually ask for. A transition applies to a slide and plays between two slides; there can be only one per slide. An animation applies to an object and plays within one slide; a single slide can hold many animations. Transitions are usually found on a Transitions menu or tab, animations on an Animations menu or a Custom Animation pane. If you remember only one line, remember: transitions move you between slides, animations move things on a slide.

Both features should be used with restraint. Choose one transition and apply it to all slides so the deck feels consistent; a different spinning effect on every slide looks amateurish and distracts from what you are saying. Use animation only when it does a job — revealing bullets one at a time so the audience listens instead of reading ahead, or building a diagram in the order you explain it. Sound effects on transitions are rarely a good idea in a school hall. Finally, if timings are set to advance automatically, rehearse the show, because an audience that is still reading a slide when it vanishes stops trusting the speaker.

The slide master is a special slide that stores the formatting and the common items for every slide based on it. It holds the background, the theme colours and fonts, the position and size of the title and body placeholders, the bullet symbols and sizes for each outline level, and anything that must repeat on every slide such as a school logo, the slide number, the date or a footer. You reach it through a master view, edit it once, and the change flows to the whole presentation.

The benefit is worth stating plainly in an answer: one change in the master updates every slide, which saves time and guarantees consistency. If your school decides that all project decks must show the school crest in the bottom corner, you place it on the master once rather than pasting it onto forty slides. Beneath the master sit the individual layouts; editing a layout affects only slides using that layout, while editing the master affects them all. Anything typed directly on an ordinary slide overrides the master for that slide only.

Two companions exist alongside it: the handout master, which controls how several slides are arranged on a printed page, and the notes master, which controls the printed notes page.

A theme is a coordinated set of colours, fonts and effects that can be applied to a presentation in one click. A template is a ready-made presentation file that supplies a design, and sometimes sample slides and instructions, as a starting point for new work; it is saved in a template format such as .potx in PowerPoint or .otp in Impress. Opening a template creates a fresh copy, so the original stays untouched. The distinction to keep straight: a template is a file you start from, while the slide master is a part inside a presentation that controls its slides.

A hyperlink is text or an object that, when clicked, jumps somewhere else. From a slide you can link to another slide in the same presentation (first, last, next, previous or a named slide), to a different file, to a web page such as the NCERT site, or to an e-mail address so that a mail window opens with the address filled in. In editing mode most packages need Ctrl and a click to follow a link; during the slide show a single click is enough. Linked text usually takes on the theme link colour and an underline, and links can be edited or removed later.

An action button is a ready-made shape that already carries a meaning — in PowerPoint the set includes Home, Back or Previous, Forward or Next, Beginning, End, Information, Help, Document, Sound and Movie, while Impress attaches the same kinds of action to any shape through its Interaction settings. When you draw one, the software asks what action it should perform, on mouse click or on mouse over: go to a particular slide, run another program, open a file or play a sound. Because the same buttons can be placed on the slide master, they appear in the same spot on every slide, giving the deck a small navigation bar.

Why does this matter? A normal presentation is linear — slide 1, then 2, then 3. Hyperlinks and action buttons make it non-linear or interactive, which is what you need for a menu slide that jumps to any chapter, a quiz where the right answer leads to a congratulations slide and a wrong answer leads back to the question, or a self-running information stall where visitors choose what to see.

Rehearse Timings runs your presentation in full screen with a small clock on screen and records how long you spend on each slide. When you finish, the software offers to save those timings against the slides so that the show can advance by itself. This is exactly what you need when the assembly gives you a fixed slot, or when a deck must run unattended at an exhibition. Timings can be cleared or edited afterwards, and an advance on mouse click setting can be restored so the speaker takes control again. Some packages also let you record narration, which stores your voice with the slides.

Setup options decide how the show behaves. PowerPoint's Set Up Slide Show dialog names three: presented by a speaker in full screen, the ordinary case; browsed by an individual in a window, for someone reading alone; and browsed at a kiosk, which loops continuously until Esc is pressed and ignores stray mouse clicks so visitors cannot disturb it. Impress offers the same looping choice under Slide Show Settings, where it is called Auto. You may also choose to show all slides or only a range, and a custom show can be defined — a named subset of slides for a shorter version of the same talk.

While running, the controls are simple and worth knowing. The show normally starts from the first slide with F5 and from the current slide with Shift+F5. Move forward with a mouse click, the space bar, Enter, Page Down or the right arrow; move back with Backspace, Page Up or the left arrow. Typing a slide number and pressing Enter jumps straight to that slide. Pressing B blanks the screen to black and W to white — useful when you want the audience to look at you or at a demonstration — and pressing the same key again restores the slide. A pen or highlighter pointer lets you write on a slide during the talk, and Esc ends the show. Shortcuts vary a little between packages and versions, so mention that when you list them.

Good design is examinable too, and the guidelines all follow from one fact: your slide will be read from the back of a room, in a few seconds, by someone who is also listening to you.

• One idea per slide, with a clear title that states that idea.
• Keep bullets short — a widely taught guideline is around six bullets per slide and around six words per bullet. Slides are notes, not paragraphs.
• Use a large font. A common classroom rule is at least 24 point for body text and larger for titles.
• Keep strong contrast: dark text on a light background, or light text on a dark background. Pale grey on white disappears on a projector.
• Prefer plain sans-serif typefaces, and use no more than two typefaces in a deck.
• Avoid ALL CAPITALS for long text, avoid too many colours, and do not rely on colour alone to carry meaning, since some viewers cannot distinguish certain colours.
• Use images that are relevant and large enough not to look grainy when projected.
• Set fonts, colours and the logo through the slide master so every slide matches.
• Proofread. A spelling mistake magnified to two metres wide is the one thing everyone remembers.
• Turn on slide numbers so the audience can refer to a slide during questions.

Two ethical points close the chapter. Pictures, data and text taken from the internet belong to somebody, so use freely licensed material or ask permission, and acknowledge your sources on a final slide. And keep a backup copy — a PDF export on a pen drive or in cloud storage — because the lab computer that will not open your file is a problem best solved before the talk, not during it.