Understanding Electronic Presentations

Whiteboard, blackboard, poster, and slide presentations have been mainstays in the business and education worlds for decades, if not longer. The presentation of various kinds of data as a series of easy-to-read, visual summaries and diagrams remains an excellent way to share information with an audience.

In the computer era, applications called presentation managers have been developed to facilitate just this kind of educational presentation. Presentation managers include applications like OpenOffice.org Impress and Microsoft PowerPoint. By providing simple tools for creating visually appealing presentations, these applications help you to create a series of slides (similar in concept to slides in a slide show of photographs) that can be shown to an audience in order to convey important information.

Slides can contain information of various kinds, including bullet lists, images and photos, charts and graphs, and numeric data. After you create and title a series of slides, you can use your PC to play back this "slide show" in front of an audience.

Because you can control the order in which the slides are shown, the content of each slide, and the transitions between slides, presentations created with applications like OpenOffice.org Impress can be seen as ideal supplements for use in public speaking engagements or any engagement at which you need to present information visually and efficiently to an audience.