To make an impact on your audience, you not only need a strong message, you also need strong visuals. Learn how presentation and illustration software helps you make an impact when showing your work.
Making a Report Come Alive
Imagine you are on your first job as an analyst in the marketing department of an organization. Your first assignment is to create a marketing plan for a new product. So you spend the next six weeks crafting an outstanding plan. Once you're done, you deliver a 40-page report to your manager. She says 'Looks great. Why don't you give a summary presentation to the team tomorrow?'
Now what? Are you going to hand out a copy of the plan to everyone and then just talk about it? Not everyone has time or interest to read your entire plan. How are you going to convey your key messages in a 10-minute presentation? How are you going to show that complicated flowchart you created to illustrate your strategy? You turn to presentation and illustration software.
Presentation Software
Presentation software allows you to organize the most important information into a series of slides. During your presentation, these slides will be projected to a screen so the audience can see them. Slides will contain text and illustrations, but only as much as the audience can absorb in the short amount of time that it will be shown during your presentation.
So you're going to summarize your 40-page plan in a small amount of text and illustrations that fits on a few slides. Your text and illustrations can be created from scratch within the presentation software, but it is common to bring in text from a word processing application and images from illustration and photo editing software. There are a number of different types of presentation software. One of the most widely used ones is PowerPoint, which is part of Microsoft Office. Another one is Impress, which is part of OpenOffice by Apache. Finally, there is Keynote, which is part of iWork by Apple.
During your actual presentation, you can use the software to present a slideshow. This shows your slides at full screen without any of the regular software menus or tools. Typically, your presentation is shown on a wall or projection screen using an LCD projector connected to your computer. You can manually navigate through your slides, or you can set a timer for how long each slide should be shown.
Software created slideshows are an interesting way information can be presented.
Slide Show Created by Software
Illustration Software
When creating a report using word processing applications or a presentation using presentation software, you may want to include some illustrations. Presentations in particular will become much more interesting when you have effective visuals. You can create