Presentation Graphics Software

Presentation Graphics Software

Presentation graphics software is application software that allows users to create visual aids for presentations to communicate ideas, mes­sages, and other information to a group. The presentations can be viewed as slides, some­times called a slide show, that are displayed on a large monitor or on a projection screen.

Presentation graphics software typically provides a variety of predefined presentation formats that define complementary colors for backgrounds, text, and graphical accents on the slides. This software also provides a vari­ety of layouts for each individual slide such as a title slide, a two-column slide, and a slide with clip art, a picture, a chart, a table, or animation. In addition, you can enhance any text, charts, and graphical images on a slide with 3-D and other special effects such as shading, shadows, and textures.

When building a presentation, users can set the slide timing so the presentation automati­cally displays the next slide after a preset delay. Presentation graphics software allows you to apply special effects to the transition between slides. One slide, for example, might fade away as the next slide is displayed.

To help organize the presentation, you can view thumbnail versions of all the slides in slide sorter view. Slide sorter view presents a screen view similar to how 35mm slides look on a photographer's light table. The slide sorter allows users to arrange the slides in any order.

Presentation graphics software typically includes a clip gallery that provides images, pictures, video clips, and audio clips to enhance multimedia presentations. Users with an artis­tic ability can create their own graphics using paint/image editing software (discussed later in the chapter) and then import (bring in) the graphics into the slide. Some audio and video editing programs, such as Producer, work with presentation graphics software, providing users with an easy means to record and insert video, music, and audio commentary in a presentation.

Presentation graphics software incorporates some of the features found in word processing software such as checking spelling, formatting, recognizing voice input, providing research capabilities, recognizing handwritten text and drawings, and creating Web pages from existing slide shows.