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~