COMMUNICATION
IN THE BIOLOGICAL SCIENCES
Department
of Biology
STRATEGIES
FOR USING PRESENTATION SOFTWARE (POWERPOINT)
FORMATTING
AND SPECIAL EFFECTS
-
Don't
get carried away with fancy formatting or overuse of moving text. Strive
for simplicity!
-
If
the audience needs to read an outline or abstract during your talk, consider
using a light colored background for your slides. The reflected light will
provide illumination to help read handouts.
FONTS
-
Avoid
using fonts smaller than 18-point.
-
Avoid
using more than 2 different types of fonts in your slide show
Example:
use Arial for slide titles and Comic Sans MS for slide text
PRESENT
DATA -- USE ONE OR MORE FIGURES OR TABLES IN YOUR PRESENTATION
-
Use
Excel to make figures.
If
you make a figure in Excel, copy the figure and then paste it into a blank
PowerPoint slide.
Click
here to learn more.
-
Make
tables directly in PowerPoint by using a PowerPoint "table slide".
USE
ONE OR MORE IMAGES IN YOUR PRESENTATION
-
A
surprising assortment of images can be found on the web. However, the quality
of these images may not be of sufficient quality for use in PowerPoint.
To download an image from the web to your computer, simply right-click
on the image (Windows uses) or just click on the image (Mac users).
-
You
can scan images (photographs, diagrams, tables, etc.) from a printed source
and insert these images into a PowerPoint slide.
Note:
It is nice to formally acknowledge the source(s) of images used in your
presentation.
Click
here to learn more about using images.
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