Summary and some thoughts

Finally, here comes the last blog post. I’ll make a general coverage of my posts this semester.

In the past two months, I spent most of the time discussing Microsoft PowerPoint, a simple but powerful tool in presentation making. By designing a program along with the blog post, I tried to convey the idea that making a concise document is not so difficult. (Hope you all accept that XDD)

From the preface to the notices for novice, we’ve made an overview of the software and the basic concepts. What follows is something a little bit advanced, the application. I’m also trying to master them and dig out more interesting but useful functions. At last an brief introduction to Prezi is made. Aiming to convince you that presentations can also be “alive”. That’s all for the content of this semester.

Now I’m going to talk about why I chose a topic that seems so boring and trivial. I think the skill of presenting oneself is of vital importance. If you are not adept at oral speaking, try visual one – present digitally. Thus, the ability of making an impressing document is needed to guarantee appreciation of your performance. Last but not least, doing such tasks can also improve your creativity and organizing ability. In a nutshell, it’s quite beneficial for everyone.

(an example, Kater's reversible pendulum, also made via PowerPoint)

I’ve also learned a lot in these 10 posts, including transforming the ideas into fluent English, making boring topics interesting, visualizing concepts through pictures precisely, and……kind of improvement in presentation making. It has also caused the tidal storm taking place in my brain. (mostly once a week) After the 10 week training, I think I’ve improved my English writing skills. (maybe…?)

At the very last, don’t lose your curiosity as your age and experience accumulate so that you can find everything worth discovering! Thanks a lot for you all!

Another program - Prezi - 1

Hi, there. These two weeks I’m going to introduce another powerful tool to make presentations – Prezi. (I was going to create some simple Prezi documents for the blog, but I wasn’t able to edit any files for my free trial had already expired…… Fortunately, I found that online editing is permitted.)

First, you can choose a theme as the background. That is, the overall style of the presentation. Some complicated templates are also implanted in the Prezi system at hand. Here’s an example:

After all, Prezi is generally designed for topics that are not so serious. So remember no to use Prezi to deliver academic speeches~

Now let’s talk about items we can utilize. Look at the picture below:

The document is made up of, basically, circular frames. So if we click the button on the upper left, a new frame is generated. In addition, you can change the frame size, the frame shape, the rotate of frame… all on your own.

If you have used Prezi, you may find the word block confusing. Though it can be placed anywhere by just a click, the font, font size, color must all be the same in a single block. So……maybe the way to solve it is to make more blocks……?

You can also change the arrangement of items easily by just dragging them into the order you want:

But, one of the most impressing features of Prezi is that a single picture can be independent as a page, and that the Prezi system will adjust the animation between items to make sure that the picture is in the right direction. Thus, you can insert pictures and make a funny, whirling project…just for fun.

That’s it for the basic introduction to Prezi. It’s truly a fun but useful program worthy of discovering. If you find it interesting, why not give it a try?

Useful functions and applications - 3

Today is our last week focusing on the introduction of Microsoft PowerPoint. Some of the techniques to do basic graphic processing will be included below.

First of all, let’s talk about adjusting the overall settings of a picture. You can use “tailor” to take off the undesired part of the picture:

You can either use some advanced adjustment to fade the picture though there isn’t a function called “fade”. Take the graph above for instance, if we increase the brightness(亮度) by 20% and decrease the contrast(對比) by 20%, we can approximately obtain a fade effect:

Sometimes when you need a schematic diagram in your presentation to convey concepts like the apparatus or a principle, you don’t need to spend that much time to find a picture that meets your need. You can create your own one without worrying about the low definition just by combining fundamental items like this:

and something more complicated like this(maybe some of you have seen this apparatus lol):

Though those pictures aren’t so beautiful, they’re clear enough to explain ideas. What’s important is to break the whole picture into parts, and then combine all finished parts altogether.

If you’ve finished all the work on creating and arranging all the items into a scheme, don’t forget to group them together and export the final picture as an independent document. By doing this, you can avoid some unpredictable rearrangements arisen during the copy-and-paste processes.

That’s all for today. Also, it’s the end of all the PowerPoint sections. I’d like to express my sincere appreciation to all of you~ In the following weeks, we’ll take strides to another interesting application to make impressing presentations – Prezi.

Useful functions and applications - 2

Today, I’m going to introduce another useful function of PowerPoint – Slide Master(投影片母片).

As the presentation is about to finish, the change of, for example, the font of the entire document may be very trivial. So, we might want a tool to help us handle these problems. Don’t be worry. Slide Master is just there at hand. It’s quite handful for everyone to use…as long as you find it under “view(檢視)” in the upper toolbar.

After you finally find the icon and click it, a new, blank document will be opened. This is where called “Slide Master”, where we can easily change the settings of the whole document.

 As you can see, there are many pages in the slide master, every single page signifies one kind of all the default settings. By changing the settings (eg. Fonts, frame location, bullets(項目符號)……etc.) we can then obtain the overall change after we close the slide master. Note that the settings of the first slide is prior to the others under it.

The slide master can also be set up at the very beginning of your work. It will be quite convenient if you have a preferred set of presentation in you mind, thus you can swiftly complete all the settings of the report.

But if we want two different set of pages combined in one document, what should we do? One simple way is just make two reports and then do some copy and paste. Another approach is to use the slide master. First we insert a new slide master(slide master 2):

For example, if I set the background blue in slide master 2, then I can obtain a page of the second setting by a right click on the new page:

Then we can put various kinds of settings altogether in a single document rather than many.

It’s all for today’s coverage of slide master. Hope you find it useful~

Useful functions and applications - 1

Now let’s begin the introduction of utilizing some of the interesting functions. Today we’re going to talk about animation design.

In short, animations are convenient when it comes to abridging unnecessary pages, shielding contents that are not presenting at the moment, highlighting short texts…etcetera. Let me show you some brief examples of these.

First, we may have many pictures to present along with a single page. You can arrange them like this,

and then let them pop up in a row of your own need. Nevertheless, there are items of different sizes that the ones behind may discomfort the audiences. So, we have to clear the background by redesign the animations:

As you can see, the next item pops up right after the previous one vanishes. Thus, the current picture can be focused on, which can boost the efficiency in your speech.

Take our general chemistry professor for example, in the chapter “Acid and base” he may let us calculate some practical questions. For sure, he himself won’t do it for us at the scene. Instead, he may use an animation to cover the correct calculation process, and then let it show up after many of us are finished.

A typical example acts like this:

The last example to introduce is the animation of text. It can produce the same effect as the covering animation without creating another shielding item. But sometimes the special effects of text animations may divert attention, so remember to be cautious when consider using them~

That’s all for today’s discussion. Hope you find it useful and try to find more practical usages when you’re going to deliver a speech~

Work-accelerating function buttons

Today, let us start to home in on the idea of the most frequently used hotkeys in Microsoft Office. Before we start the introduction to them, I would like to tell a brief story of mine.

I had an experience of conducting a simple preliminary research in elementary school. For I and my classmates were all young kids, the teachers had made a brief list of the content so that we didn’t have to worry about of the structure of the final report. Feeling easy, we start to do some tricks in Microsoft Word for we were using it when doing the report. Out of curiosity, we’ve tried various button combination aiming to discover some novel functions, thus, we found many hotkeys and learned to use some interesting Unicode.

Now we’ll begin the introduction from the most basic but important ones:

Ctrl + C: copy

Ctrl + V: paste

Ctrl + X: cut

Ctrl + Z: undo

Ctrl + A: select all

Ctrl + Q: align text left (靠左對齊)

Ctrl + R: align text right (靠右對齊)

Ctrl + E: center text (置中)

Ctrl + B: boldface (粗體)

Ctrl+ I: italic (斜體)

Ctrl + +/=: subscript (下標)

Ctrl + Shift + +/=: superscript (上標)

Usually, the signs on the keys of the keyboard have their arranging logic. You can acquire the symbols on the upper left corner by pressing “Shift” and then press the target button. If you substitute the additional button with “Ctrl”, then you can get the lower left icon, at least in some specific input method.

At last, let me tell you some interesting trick done by Unicode. First, switch the input method to “新注音” or “新倉頡”, then press the button right under “esc”, the “~/`”. You may see a block popping out like this:

   

Now, you can type many interesting symbols applying the Unicode. There’re some examples below, to name just a few:

`U2605 ★

`U2606 ☆

`U2192 →

`U03BC μ

`U25B2 ▲

`U25B3 △

If you want to discover more of them to make good use of, you can look it up in “Insert – Symbols” in the toolbar on the top row:

The content encircled by the red frame is the hotkey of the symbol chosen. 

That's all for today's introduction. Thank you for watching!

Some mistakes easily made by novices - 3

To everyone’s relief, finally it comes the last week of this series! In this week we’re gonna introduce the last two simple things to notice, and thus finish our demo presentation. But don’t assume that it will be the final version to propose, there are still something to do with. That’s what we’ll talk about in the following weeks. Hope you will find them more useful then~

First, it’s quite common to have some tables in the document. As every of you can imagine, tables of raw data are desperately undesirable.

Feeling dizzy…right? So, how can we remedy the table? One way is to divide the table into several parts, and use the data to compose diagrams so as to express your idea. Another way is to make some handouts and deliver it to all the audiences before your speech.

After making considerable efforts, the main frame of our report is established. Usually, unless there’s a handout already, we will insert a page where all the contents are concisely listed. It’s called “preface”, or “table of contents”, which helps the listeners to have a overview of your presentation.

(Usually, we’ll make the preface first, then use those terms as the titles in the following pages)

Honestly, there’s still another thing to notice: the composition of the content. The arrangements must be logical. The concept is simple, but sometimes you will be puzzled with it. A recommendation is to think through all your topics and try to compose a plausible story combining all of them. This can also be the summary of your speech.

Take those tips in mind, then all of you can compose a simple, but well-constructed presentation. In the following weeks, we’ll go through several different methods and functions to polish your document and PowerPoint skills, which may make you like a genuine professional.

That’s it for today’s discussion, hope to see you next week~

By the way, the PowerPoint document has been uploaded to Google drive. Here's the link:

https://drive.google.com/file/d/0Bwa5RmUSbHyXbW5fbGhaeWoxSE0/view?usp=sharing

(If you want to know more interesting facts pertaining water, you can click the link and browse my document~~)

Some mistakes easily made by novices - 2

Welcome to the third post! Today we’re going to continue talking about the mistakes a novice may easily make.

Considering the question “Why we can’t make those mistakes intentionally just for fun?” a reader commented below, I’d like to say that, it’s totally acceptable and may be praised for creativity. 

But what matters is whether you’re aware of those errors or not. The aim of these posts is to raise everyone’s consciousness of these. Thanks for all the comments~~

Now, let’s go on the third thing to notice: the fonts and their sizes. If used properly, your presentation will be more inspiring. But if you utilize like the picture below, it won’t be a good choice.

As you all can see, we may want to do some fancy tricks using the various implanted font types and sizes. But we may fail when we take them altogether in a single page. So, what is needed? The answer is simple but hard: proper tricks in proper place:

The following issue is item composing. When we want, or need to make a complex figure, for instance, a hydrogen-oxygen fuel cell model, a set of items can be created:

If we keep those items independent, it can be hard to keep the whole figure intact after some further revise. Thus, a better way to get rid of those concerns is to group them altogether like this:

By using this technique, harnessing complicated made-up figures is just a piece of cake. You can even export the figure as a png file_[1] to use the picture outside this PowerPoint document. By the way, it’s also vital to make the picture concise, too.

Hope you enjoy today’s…lesson(?!) and wish you all have a happy holiday~ Glad to have you finished this post. We’ll usher in the end of this series next week.

[1]: PNG: Portable Network Graphics, a format of graphics which is loselessly compressed and is compatible with network data transportation.

( reference: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Portable_Network_Graphics )

Some mistakes easily made by novices - 1

Hi, everyone. Today’s topic is the beginning of a series called’ Some mistakes easily made by novices. We’ll go through two of them in today’s post. Then…let’s get started!

When making your first PowerPoint presentation, you may consider it important to let all the audiences know what you’re talking about. So, you may feel quite grateful to Lawrence G. Tesler, the inventor of  ‘copy and paste’ ,and try to copy the whole paragraph, like this:

DO NOT do this! First, plagiarizing other’s words is wrong. Second, it won’t let you have better understandings about the topic. Third, a page tucked with words can definitely exhaust the audiences.

It’s proper to list the highlights of the paragraph on your own. Using boldface to emphasize is also acceptable, like this:

Sometimes, we may want to insert a picture in our presentation to make it more convincing, humorous, or imaginable. It is quite convenient that PowerPoint can help you to make animations of chosen items. Moreover, you can even draw the path of item movement on your own! But, please never draw a path like this:

It seems very trivial, isn’t it? When you are designing animations, don’t forget to simplify their paths. That is, try to avoid making any unnecessary turns or circulations. If can, adjust the animation speed to your speech will make your presentation even better. There’s an example below:

This is the end of this week’s post. There’re still some basic concepts to know. I’ve tried to make the post more interesting and meaningful. If there’re still conspicuous defects or deficiency in the post, please give me feedbacks to let me know.

Thanks for your attention to read through the post. Hope you all enjoy it! 

Brief Introduction

Hello, everyone! This is 鄭善文 and I’m going to introduce some tips in making a presentation by Microsoft Office PowerPoint. In the end of this semester, I’ll also make a brief introduction of another useful tool – Prezi. Hope you will like my posts.

First, I’d like to make a brief overview of PowerPoint. This is the User Interface.

As you can see, this is a blank presentation ready to design the covering. For instance, if we want to make a presentation about water, then we’ll do this:

The word ”ChengSW” in gray is probably the author’s name, the instructor or other information of the designer(s).

Usually, we start making a presentation like this. This is the end of today’s post. I tried to create a presentation along with the topic I’m going to say. By doing so, you can see step by step the process a moderate presentation is generated. In the next post we will discuss what mistakes a novice may make easily. Hope you won’t feel it boring and continue following my post next week!