Visual Presentation
To support oral presentations, a visual presentation of key statements and/or illustrative materials is a good idea. Digital presentations have almost completely replaced overhead projectors or slide projectors. Although the term “PowerPoint presentation” shows the dominance of a particular product, it is misleading: screen presentations can be created using a variety of different tools.
The two large office packages, Microsoft Office and LibreOffice, contain programs for the design of on-screen presentations with PowerPoint and Impress respectively. These are very graphically oriented, so you can easily select different designs, insert graphics and dynamically display and animate individual elements. For the Office packages, see the note boxes in section Office Applications.
LaTeX also contains components for creating on-screen presentations, such as LaTeX Beamer. Presentations created with LaTeX are more structure-oriented. This allows for automatic tables of contents or the highlighting of the current part of a presentation. For general information about LaTeX see the notes box in the section LaTeX.
In all cases, special attention must be paid to the fact that the technical possibilities of the software are intended to support the presentation, but are not an end in themselves. Thus, an on-screen presentation only makes sense for presentations of a certain length. An on-screen presentation is suitable for the following purposes:
Writing down the core theses of the presentation in order to make it easier to follow the oral presentation,
graphic representation of complex facts that are difficult to convey in pure language (e.g. diagrams, charts) and
support of the presentation with further media (e.g. pictures, videos or audio documents).
Many presentation programs offer a wide range of options for designing slides and elements on slides. Especially fade-ins of text parts and fade-ins between slides can be animated in many ways. While these possibilities are exciting at first glance, on closer inspection their use is limited. A presentation gains from these effects when the attention of the audience is directed in a targeted manner. It loses when the attention is diverted from the content of the presentation. Too many visual gimmicks should therefore be avoided.
As effects may make sense:
Inserts of enumerations to display key points only when they are mentioned in the presentation. This prevents the readers from reading in advance the contents that have not yet been mentioned in the presentation.
Step-by-step fade-in of diagrams.
Fade-ins between sections.
On-screen presentations require a certain amount of technical effort during creation and presentation. It must be ensured that a projector and a computer are available on which the presentation can be played. For presentations of a few minutes the effort is therefore rarely justified. The choice of the appropriate file format is also important for presentations in order to avoid problems during playing:
On most computers (but not on all) Microsoft PowerPoint is installed. However, different computers or different PowerPoint versions may cause shifts in the display.
LibreOffice Impress is not installed on all computers. Impress presentations can be saved in Microsoft PowerPoint format, but this may result in the loss of functions such as animations.
PDF files created from PowerPoint, Impress or LaTeX can be played almost everywhere. Only a PDF viewer such as Adobe Reader is required. In addition, a correct display in this format is guaranteed. However, animations and fade-in effects are lost when exporting to PDF.
In order to ensure the correct reproduction of on-screen presentations, it may therefore be advisable to bring your own laptop on which the presentation has been tested beforehand.
- background, font and effects are kept simple and not overloaded
- the font is sufficiently large.
- at most one topic is treated per slide.
- the slides are not overloaded with information.
- In general, only the most important information is visualized, not every detail of the presentation.
- In the oral presentation not only the points on the slides are read out.
- Pictures, schemes, diagrams, charts, tables and statistics are to be discussed, not just for decoration.