Presentation slide

A slide is a single page of a presentation. Collectively, a group of slides may be known as a slide deck. A Slide show is an exposition of a series of slides or images in an electronic device or in a projection screen.

In the latter part of the 20th century, a presentation slide was created on a transparency and viewed with an overhead projector.

In the digital age, a slide most commonly refers to a single page developed using a presentation program such as Microsoft PowerPoint, Apple Keynote or Apache OpenOffice. It is also possible to create them with a document markup language, for instance with the LaTeX class Beamer.

Lecture notes in slide format are referred to as lecture slides, frequently downloadable by students in .ppt or .pdf format.

Slides producing softwares

Presentation slides can be done by different types of software: Microsoft PowerPoint, Apple Keynote, Prezi, SlideDog, ClearSlide, SlideShark, Haiku Deck, Slide Bureau, Powtoon, MediaShout, Kineticast, KnowledgeVision, GoAnimate, Wink, Snagit, Camtasia Studio, CamStudio, Articulate Presenter, SlideShare, VisualBee (which is related to PowerPoint as long as it also produces graphics for it), Emaze, Presaria, Proclaim, Slides and Reallusion, among others.

Some of the software like PowToon or GoAnimate produce slides with more animation in respect to the other software. In fact, this two software are big competitors in the video animated slides presentation programs. Others like CamStudio can be used to record the screen activity.^[1]

The most popular slides producing software are Microsoft PowerPoint, Prezi, Apple Keynote and ClearSlide.^[2]

• PowerPoint is a slide show software engineered by Microsoft. Currently is the most popular slides presentation program. It is suitable for both, business and educational purposes.
• Prezi was developed in 2009 by Peter Arvai, Peter Halácsy and Ádám Somlai-Fischer in Budapest and San Francisco. Today, Prezi has 40 million users all around the world, is used in 35% of the biggest companies of the world and every second, two slide presentations are made with Prezi.^[3]
• Apple Keynote was updated for OS X El Capitan that can be used with Mac and any other apple device. It is the most powerful slides presentation app ever developed for a mobile with a big variety of templates, themes and animations for its slides.^[4]
• ClearSlide is commonly used in marketing and sales organizations to attract customers for achieving increased business outcomes.^[5]

Google Slides

Google Slides is a slides producing software designed by Google. It was developed at the same time as Google Docs and Sheets, in 2007. With them you can create a document and work in real time at the same time as other people.

With Google Slides you have the chance of creating and editing your presentations with coworkers, having the option of publishing your work in the website. Google Slides allows you introducing images and videos into your presentation. The chance of importing .pps and .pptx and converting them into Google presentations and of downloading the presentations in .pdf, .jpg, .txt, .svg or .ppg file.^[6]

For further information about how to use it, go to the getting started Google Slides guide.

Best use(s) of slides

When creating and editing slides, you can follow some tips for approaching the best slides.

• Keep it simple. Presentation slides were not designed for gaining the attention in a speech or presentation, they are made for supporting it. The slides should have blank spaces and should not be filled up with useless information for avoiding the white spaces.
• The excess of bullet points and text in slides is something that makes the slide deck boring and repetitive. Slides should not be overload with too much text.
• Every presentation slides software has transitions and object builds (commonly called animations) to include in the slides. A good presentation can be completed with some object builds but not too many.
• Slides are popularly filled of documents, graphics and images. The better the quality of the image or graphic, the better the presentation will be.
• Videos can also be added to slides.
• There are different types of charts to include in a slide deck: pie charts, vertical bar charts, horizontal bar charts and line charts. Those ones are the most frequently used. Tables can also be added to the slides.
• The colour in slides is something that all slides producing software gives the ability to choose. The colour can be chosen in every aspect of the slide, from the background to the text.
• All software give the option between different fonts to choose.^[7]

Designing a slide deck

When it comes to getting started with a slides presentation, the first decision to take is how to design the slide deck. The design of a slide is based on the template chosen for it. Templates are the format that the slides will have, and in the same slide deck, there can only be one same template for all slides.^[8] The template is normally set up before starting working on the document. The reason why the template has to be defined before starting editing the slides is because they determine some factors of the slides, which are:

• How are the margins of the entire slide deck going to be.
• The format of the heading, subheading and the body text.
• If there is going to be text before starting writing, what is called standard text.^[9]

After choosing a template for the slide deck, the next step is selecting how the text is going to look like, which means deciding the size, colour and the type of letter, also if the text is going to be in Italic, Bold or underlined.^[10]

After finishing a slides presentation the majority of the software give the possibility of adding transitions and animations to the slides or complementing the slide with sound or visual effects. For example, applying in and out animations, sounds to bullets and motion path to images.^[11]

Slide sharing websites

Sharing slide presentations online is helpful for e-Learning, which is the capability of learning electronically, mainly through computers using the internet. As technology develops, with new tablets and smartphones, is a learning method becoming more popular.^[12] Websites that enable sharing slides and presentation contribute to e-Learning.

A few of the benefits of slide sharing are:

• The uploaded file can´t be used without the authors permission, this means it can´t be stolen or copied. Slide sharing websites allow sharing presentations with everyone without losing security.
• Uploading any type of file, from Microsoft PowerPoint to Keynote (presentation software), including PDF files.
• Presentations can also be seen on smartphones.
• Slides can be uploaded in different ways, with a link or a code, for example.
• Feedback can also be given by the users that take advantage of the presentations.^[13]

The leading slide sharing websites

SlideShare allows the user to share presentations publicly or privately. Slides can be uploaded in various ways, via email and through social media are the most common ways of sharing the slides.^[14]

AuthorSTREAM only allows the user to upload PowerPoint presentation slides. On this website users can give feedback by rating presentations and posting comments.^[15]

SlideBoom turns slide presentations into Adobe Flash for a better accessibility.^[16][17]

SlideOnline allows the user to upload PowerPoint presentations and share them as a web page in any device or to embed them in WordPress as part of the posts comments.^[18]

Another way of sharing slides is by turning them into a video. The most common converters are SlideAlloy, Movavi and WonderShare.

E-Learning

The main purpose of sharing slides on the internet is e-Learning. Uploading the presentation to a Learning management system (LMS), which is a software application designed for e-Learning, such as DigitalChalk, is a way of sharing slides into a website, which its main objective is electronic education.

DigitalChalk is an online platform created to upload files such as presentation slides in order to create online courses available for everyone who is willing to pay for them. Courser is another e-Learning platform but for free users. This online platforms are commonly used by companies and organizations to train their staff members.^[19]

See also

• Reversal film - photographic slides produced from camera film & viewed with a slide projector
• Transparency (projection) - viewed with an overhead projector

References