How to Make a Good Power Point Presentation

I found the top ten slide tips and the faculty recommendations the most helpful articles. The top ten slide tips article emphasizes simplicity and the use of white space. There should be no distractions on your slides. This article also explains that it is ok to have an almost empty slide. Do not feel as if you need to fill up empty spaces with pictures or logos that do not really need to be there. The faculty recommendations also emphasized the importance of a simple powerpoint presentation, but it also focused on the in-slide text. There should be almost no text or bullet points throughout a power point presentation. Usually the points and information that is provided on a slide is just repeating what is going to be verbalized in the presentation. My advice for a good power point is
1. Avoid Clip-Art
Clip art is very animated and a real picture is more relatable for an audience
2. No bullet points
If a slide has any text at all there should be no need for bullet points because there should not be enough information to bullet
3. Color Coordination
Do not use an extreme variety of colors. It tends to be distracting and hard to follow.
4. Large Font
Font that is too small tends to make the presentor feel the need to cram more information into each slide and makes it hard to read for the audience
5. Avoide Excessive Animation
Slide transitions that are too slow or too elaborate and take away from the information that is trying to be conveyed to the audience.

A bad power point presentation has too much information on each slide. It also tries to make up for lack of research with colors, clip art, and extreme transitions. In a bad power point presentation the presentor will read directly from the slides and not engage the audience.

Searching the Internet

Chris Nolan's talk about search engines was very helpful and interesting. I was interested to learn that almost 50% of people use google as their dominant search engine. Yahoo and msn are the next two most used. I was suprised to learn that 7% of the information on the internet is invisible! This means that when we type in something on a search engine, we only get about 93% of the information on that topic that is available. Another really interesting thing that I found out that I was not aware of is what the .org means at the end of a web address. .org means that the website is a non profit organization. Some people make the mistake of thinking that .org sites are less biased because they are not run on money, but even though .org sites are not commercial does not mean that they are not trying to sell you their ideas....

Copyright

I was not in class today but in reading over a classmates notes on copywrite I learned a lot more than I thought I would. I found it really interesting that the copywright law is 19 months older than the bill of rights! That shows how important it is in our nation's history. I also learned that it is a felony to share more than 10 copies or a value of over 2500. One issue in the copywright area is that of the public domain. Many argue that if an author is dead their work should go into the public domain, but the law states that the dead author's work is protected up to 75 years after the death. I feel that 75 years may be a bit extensive, but I do not think that an author's work should be released of its copywrite at the moment of their death. I think that maybe 15-20 years after death would be sufficient, 75 just seems unreasonable.

Excel Skills

I liked working with excel because, once I learned all of the information, it was really easy to enter data quickly and accurately. The formulas we learned help to quickly compute numbers. I learned about excel last year in school, but one of the things that I learned this year that I had not known about before is the shortcut for the absolute cell references. I did not know that F4 was a shortcut to typing out the $ for each cell number. I think that this and many of the other things that I have learned will definately help me in my next few years here at Trinity. I am sure I will have to use this program and the things I learned about it in more than a few classes and being familiar with it will give me a step up over my classmates. I also believe that in the business world Excel is a very prominent program and being comfortable with it will help me in my job search after college.