- Author: Kathy Keatley Garvey
The seminar, "Best Practices for Scientific Presentations: Information Design, Advanced PowerPoint, and Scientific Storytelling," will take place from 10 to 11 a.m., Thursday, Dec. 15 in 122 Briggs Hall, Kleiber Hall Drive.
"For the past several years I have been teaching workshops to faculty and graduate students at various international organizations/institutions on digital strategies in university instruction," Carey said. These include the Consortium for Advanced Research Training in Africa (Nairobi), the European Doctoral School of Demography (Rome), and the Agricultural University of Faisalabad (Pakistan). Carey will package the information he presents on best practices in scientific talks into three domains:
- Information/graphic design concepts—how to visualize information/data clearly and efficiently including decluttering;
- Projection and presentation techniques (PPT)—how to walk audiences through each slide to keep them engaged and their gaze directed; and
- Scientific storytelling—how to structure talks to ensure coherency and flow. Although his workshops typically are multi-day affairs with hands-on projects, he has distilled most of the key concepts and methods into a 50-minute best-practices presentation.
Here's why to attend:
"I ran across this statement while researching: “The amount of time and effort you invest in preparing your talk is in direct proportion to what you have at stake," Carey said. If you attend this presentation, you will know best practices and be made aware of the time it will take you to prepare a talk designed to impress—all depending on “what's at stake."
For more information, contact Carey at jrcarey@ucdavis.edu
- Author: Mark Bolda
The link below is to the pdf files of the Powerpoint presentations of the 2015 Annual Strawberry Production meeting held this past February 20.
http://ucanr.edu/2015 annual strawberry meeting presentations
Thanks again to all the presenters for making these files available and to all of you who attended!
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- Author: Cynthia Kintigh
Spanish-language versions of the new PowerPoint templates are now available in the Toolkit. The zip file contains both a .pot and a .pptx file.
- Author: Michael L. Poe
Microsoft Powerpoint works great until it doesn't. A common problem I'm hearing about is font substitution.
Pros know that it is a bad idea to mix fonts. Ideally, you stick to the same font throughout your flyer, poster, powerpoint file or whatever you are producing. You can bold, highlight, italicize the same font for emphasis as needed, but it is still same font. The common fonts between computers are usually Arial, Times New Roman, Tahoma, and Verdana. When there are substitutions of these basic fonts, they are hardly detected. That's a good thing.
Powerpoint doesn’t embed fonts by default, which means that you may have a font on your computer that someone else does not. When they open your Powerpoint presentation it will look very different from what you created, because when Windows can not find the font you specified it will substitute another font, with results that can be unsettling. Switching between Mac and PC can result in small empty boxes instead of letters and that's even worse. Your letter font was probably substituted for a symbol font. So it is best to stick with the common fonts.
The second way to avoid the problem is to tell PowerPoint to embed your fonts. This means that the fonts you use will travel with your presentation, and should eliminate the missing font problem.
Font Embedding
These steps guarantee you will have the fonts you want when you move your file to any other PC, and you won't need to load custom fonts onto the presentation machine when you arrive at your speaking destination.
Note that font embedding will increase your file's size. To keep the file size a bit smaller, you can embed only the characters that are used in your presentation (rather than a full font set); or, you can embed all font characters, which can result in a much larger file. Unless you are sure you or others won't make any changes to the file, embedding all characters is recommended.
To embed fonts in your PowerPoint 2010 or 2007 presentation:
1. Install on your computer any custom fonts that you want to use. You can't embed fonts into your presentation unless the fonts have already been installed.
2. Open the PowerPoint presentation.
3. Do one of the following:
- In PowerPoint 2010, click the File tab, and then click Options in the left pane.
- In PowerPoint 2007, click the Office button in the upper left corner, and then click PowerPoint Options.
4. In the PowerPoint Options dialog box, in the left pane, click Save.
5. Under Preserve fidelity when sharing this presentation, select the Embed fonts in the file check box.
6. We recommend also selecting the second option, Embed all characters (best for editing by other people).
7. Click OK.
To turn off embedding, follow the same steps above, but deselect the Embed fonts in the file check box in step 5.
If you have questions about this, remember the Help in your version of Powerpoint will let you search for "embed fonts."
- Author: Cynthia Kintigh
I get to see a lot of the Toolkit elements "in action."
I'm going to give you some feedback on your Powerpoint presentations.
Sometimes there's just too much information on a slide. Photos crowd out the branding elements. Charts and graphs cover all but a sliver of the background.
I understand that sometimes you have a lot of information to convey - success is how you handle these large amounts of information.
So here is a secret:
It's OK to have a slide in your presentation that doesn't have the branding. Once you've established the theme of the presentation, it's OK to have a slide with a blank background that contains large photos, charts, or graphs.
You need to have a slide that contains just a large photo? Go for it!
You've got charts and graphs? Go for it!
And better yet - it's easy! So here's how you do it:
I'm working on an update of We Are ANR so I'll use that as an example.
Here are the first 4 slides:
In the first slide the photo collage overlaps the slide theme a bit. The overlap isn't pronounced and it overlaps into a gradient area of the background art. I need to establish the brand to my audience on this first slide, so I'm going to leave this overlap in place on this one.
Slide 2 - no problem.
Slide 3 - again, a bit of an overlap, but since it's about the same as on the first slide I'm going to leave it as is.
Slide 4 - Now here we've clearly got a problem, right?
I could fiddle with the images and make them smaller, but then they lose their clarity and impact. Since I now have my branding established, I'm going to hide the background art on this slide only.
With the slide you want to edit on your screen, go to Format Background. You can get there on the menu under Format or if you're a Ribbon person it's on the Themes tab.
You'll get a dialog box that looks something like this: At the bottom of the window is a check box that says "Hide Background Graphics"Check that box, click apply and poof! Your slide has a white background.
Now take a look at your slide and see what needs adjusting now that the background is gone. In this case, re-centering the header would be a good idea.