Introduction
Microsoft PowerPoint is a presentation program developed in 1984from a soft aware that used bullet lists and overhead projectors. It allows the user to create slides, handouts and notes. The slide shows can incorporate text, graphics, videos and animations fully agree with Edward Tufte. In that PowerPoint is an antisocial setup where the speaker dominates the audience by highlighting the main points to followers in bullets form. The slides should be used by the speaker to outline their talks but not merely to summarize their content. PowerPoint promotes format over content that brings about commercialization rather than an educative presentation.
The time used for presenting Edward Tufte (2000) in his assessment of the NASA reports the report was classified into 3 reports totaling up to twenty-eight slides. According to the psychology of presentation skills the first fifteen minutes are the most crucial minutes of the presentation as after that people become boring and tiring and therefore their level of concentration lowered.
Summative Headings
The captivating headings diminish the existence of subtitles and rest of the text. The presenters captivate on impressing the general audience with titles by using different font sizes, color underlined and bolded and therefore pull the reader away from the most important features in the slides and therefore the engineers overlooked the reports by Boeing Corporation engineers.
The styles of writing Genevieve Liang (2000) mostly affect the students in the elementary school whereby they do exercises and then post them through the internet. It mostly consisting of ten to twenty summative words. This inhibits flawlessness in essays and therefore should be discouraged and students encouraged to use better software like Microsoft windows which allows the use of full sentences and the teachers can be able to know whether a certain concept was understood.
A statistical way of analyzing data
Visual reasoning is more effective when important information is put together for comparison purposes. The more the information is detailed the more the understanding and clarity. This is important in fundamental analyses of statistical data. After the completion of my undergraduate studies I went for my internship in one of the research companies. I was sent to one of the provinces for a three months research on the factors contributing to the widespread of a certain disease so I prepared well and did my research in good time and prepared my slide show well but in presentation I was confused in my interpretation of my graphs and charts as there not clear there was a mix up between the vertical and the horizontal axis’ and couldn’t elaborate on my conclusions and findings.
Conclusion
Powerpoint is a good slide manager and a projector, but has been misused in that PowerPoint should be used to supplement a presentation rather than take over the whole presentation. Compliment PowerPoint presentation with excel for statistical representation of data, therefore I would recommend the use of printed reports as they provide all the information required rather than bullet presented points. In schools PowerPoint presentations should be discouraged completely. Students should be encouraged to write in continuous prose to improve their writing skills.
References
- Tufte, E (2003) lousy PowerPoint presentations–the fault of pp users. Web.
- Liang, G (2000) five experts Dispute Edward Tufte on PowerPoint.