APP110 Week 3 | General Computer Science in Computer Science - CEHE

APP 110 Business Computer Fundamentals Week 3 Assignment

Learning Objectives Covered:

LO 05.02 – Create a Microsoft PowerPoint Presentation following widely accepted best practices for a business environment LO 05.04 – Apply basic formatting functions to a Microsoft PowerPoint presentation Career Relevancy One of the go-to programs for many professionals in all types of industries to create presentations is Microsoft PowerPoint. You may ask yourself, I’m not going to have to present anything in my chosen career path, so why do I need to learn this? Even if you are not a professional presenter, at some point you will need to share your ideas with colleagues, tell a story graphically, or even put together something to organize and outline your thoughts. PowerPoint is a tool that can accomplish this in any type of business environment. Learning even the basic formatting functions will help you take what you want to share to a new level beyond just writing a document. Background APP101_wk3_A.jpg In this week’s discussions, we covered some dos and don’ts when creating a presentation. This included not only best practices formatting slides, but how to present yourself while showing an audience the presentation you have created. We will explore this more along with learning basic formatting techniques to help you get up and running in PowerPoint in no time at all. There is a general set of criteria that are best to follow to make sure your presentation does not bore your audience. These tips include: A presentation that is loaded with lots of text or images (or both) can be a distraction for your audience, and could cause them to tune you out. Keeping slides simple in appearance makes them easier to follow along with. Limit bullet points and text. As mentioned in the previous tip, text-heavy or image-laden slides are hard to follow along with. Limit your bullet points and images to only what is necessary to convey the direction you are moving in. Remember that you the speaker are the presentation, not the PowerPoint slides. Limit transitions and animation. Similar to the rule about text and images, you should only use transitions and animation when necessary, such as to call audience attention to certain terms or images. Use high-quality graphics and videos. Because your use of images and videos will be limited, it’s important that the images and videos used are of high quality. Pixelated images or videos with poor sound or visual quality will turn your audience off. Having a theme is important. A good visual theme will help unify your presentation and make it more appealing for audience members to follow along with. Choose charts and graphs wisely. While graphs and charts can help you drive home a point through visual representation of statistics or data, be sure to only include charts and graphs that your audience members will be able to easily read. Use color wisely. Colors can be inviting and pleasing or overwhelming and distracting. Choose colors that complement each other well and display clearly on screen. Choose fonts wisely. Fonts should be easy to read and professional in appearance. Use video and audio when appropriate. Sound bites and clips can help bring a presentation to life, but only when necessary. If you can achieve the same effect by explaining the points addressed through video or audio, it could mean the media should not be included in your presentation. Sort your slides. Using the slide sort tool in Microsoft PowerPoint will give you a “bird’s eye view” of your presentation so that you can see its organization and flow more clearly. Because people tend to receive information better in small chunks, you should organize your presentation so that your audience does not become overwhelmed by information overload at certain parts. Now that you have a good idea of the type of content that should go onto your slides, let’s get to know how simple it is to get started using PowerPoint and make that content come alive. When you first launch PowerPoint, it will give you a splash screen where you have all different types of pre-designed themes to choose from. Using these themes are a good way to see how slides are built, but to set your presentation apart from the crowd, learning how to customize it a bit will show your audience that you care about your topic and want to make a difference with how you present the material. How many times have you seen something over and over again in different places and after a while, the content just doesn’t register in your brain because you think you’ve seen it before? Well, in the business world, this can happen if you fail to make your presentation unique. Your instructor will show you some important and cool tricks to take an ordinary PowerPoint Theme and make it unique so it will stand out. And be sure to check out the required readings and videos found on the Course Media page to help you get started. Please watch the short video below for instructions on how to use templates in PowerPoint. (3:48 min) Prompt For this assignment, you will create a simple slideshow presentation utilizing PowerPoint’s basic formatting tools. You can create your own content or use this link (Links to an external site.) to evaluate content on Job Search Success Strategy to put into your slides. Remember all of the best practices on picking relevant content for slides. You can always include info in the comments to help remind you other topics related to what the slide is showing to talk about. Do not forget to include any citations where you get your information. Below is the citation for the Job Search Success Strategy website above.

Your slideshow presentation must include the following at a minimum:

A title slide Add an additional 7 slides (8 total slides) Choose a theme layout that fits well with the subject of your presentation Use comments on at least 2 slides Change the font style from the default font found in the theme you chose to something else; keep it professional Change the theme’s color scheme from its default setting; keep in mind best practices for slideshow themes At least one slide must have a text box with more than 1 column At least one bulleted list At least one numbered list Add a citation page for any of your sources. If you used the Job Search Success Strategy website to help with your slideshow content, you will need to cite that resource on your references page. You can copy this citation to do so:

References

Joyce, S. P. (n.d.). Job Search Success Strategy: PROactive vs. REactive Job Search. Retrieved October 2, 2018, from https://www.job-hunt.org/article_proactive_job_search.shtml