Presentation Software Janodya Moonamale University of Auckland - - PDF document

Presentation Software

Janodya Moonamale University of Auckland jmoo829 - 5457480

ABSTRACT

This report looks into the concept of how software tools can be improved to make presentations more successful. This re- port breaks the process of giving a presentation down into three stages; creating the presentation, rehearsing the pre- sentation and finally delivering the presentation. The first stage of creating a presentation looks predominately into tools which help create slides automatically. The second sec- tion looks into training systems which help a presenter im- prove their presentation through training. The final section looks into issues in giving a final presentation such as giving a demonstration which can be hard to execute properly. It was found that there are a lot things that can be done to existing software which can be used to improve presentations.

INTRODUCTION

The following report deals with the topic of presentation soft-

• ware. Software has been used to aide in presentations for

many years, mainly to create slides for a presentation through the use of tools such as Microsoft PowerPoint and video edit- ing software for video playback. While these tools have their benefits in making a presentation they do not necessarily help to make a presentation more successful. This report looks into presentation software and focuses particularly on how to make presentations more successful through the use of soft- ware tools. In doing this, this report will delve into the pro- cess of giving a presentation, breaking it down into three main tasks: creating the presentation, rehearsing and finally deliv- ering the presentation. It will also explore problems and is- sues faced by presenters which limit or prevent the success of a presentation.

DEFINITIONS

Before proceeding further, the definition of how software makes a presentation more successful should be clarified so that the term is not ambiguous. In this report, a presentation is made more successful through the use of software, if the software tool can remove obstacles, outline critical issues or at least make it easier to overcome a challenge faced by a presenter in making a presentation.

OBJECTIVE

Currently software is predominantly used in the presentation process as a visual aide to the presentation, either in the form

• f PowerPoint slides or multimedia such as videos. The prob-

lem is that these software tools, although useful, do not ac- tively help in making a presentation more successful, rather just does what is commanded by the user without providing any feedback or suggestions. Furthermore, popular presenta- tion software, such as PowerPoint, can also hinder the over- all performance of a presentation if used incorrectly. An ex- ample of this is the commonly made mistake of having too much information on the slides, this can be fatal when giving a presentation as the overload of information to an audience member will make them lose interest in the presentation, thus making the presentation unsuccessful. This mistake can eas- ily be avoided if the presentation software for example, gives a warning if it detected slides as having too much informa-

• tion. The objective of this report is therefore to look into

what changes can be made to software used in the presenta- tion process to make the presentation more successful.

CURRENT TOOLS

The most popular software tool for creating presentations is Microsoft PowerPoint. PowerPoint is a tool which allows users to create a PowerPoint presentations by designing and creating slides from within the software program. Up until recent iterations of PowerPoint, there was no extra features which helped a presenter in a presentation besides creating

• slides. However Microsoft has seemed to have recognised

the need for more functionality in relation to giving a pre- sentation and so has added the ability to create notes which

• nly a presenter can see on their own screen during a presen-

tation and also an inbuilt stopwatch to allow a presenter to time themselves practicing and to keep track of time during a

• presentation. On a similar note, Apple offers Keynote which

also has much of the same functionality found in PowerPoint but is targeted at the Apple user group. Other online versions

• f slide creations tools are available with much more limited

functionality, such as Google slides. Other tools commonly used in presentations are video editing software for creating videos for presentations. Some exam- ples of video creation tools are Windows movie maker and Final Cut Pro. These tools are powerful for creating provide no real additional functionality useful to someone creating a video for a presentation. It quickly becomes apparent that although there are very pow- erful tools available for creating presentations, they have lim- ited functionality when it comes to helping improve the qual- ity of a presentation.

STRUCTURE

There are three main stages in making a presentation, these are: creating the presentation, rehearsing the presentation and finally delivering the presentation. Software has the potential to be used in all three of these stages to improve the final out- come of a presentation. The rest of this report will be broken into the three aforementioned stages of presenting, to discuss the role software can play to make the overall presentation more successful.

CREATION OF A PRESENTATION

The creation of a presentation is a key part in any presenta-

• tion. This stage involves creating the slides for a presenta-

tion and also preparing what to talk about. This usually in- volves creating PowerPoint slides using one of the software tools mentioned previously. These tools allow a user to cre- ate slides in any which way they choose. This has the bene- fit of allowing freedom to choose the style, layout, ordering, and content of presentation slides, however with this extra freedom comes the opportunity for users to create bad slides, meaning they suffer from common issues such as too much content on slides, poor colour choice, bad layout and illogical presentation flow. Having any one of these issues means that a presentation is not as good as it can be. A possible solution to this problem is automating the slide creation process to a software program. By allowing a soft- ware tool to create slides automatically a presenter saves time for other aspects of their presentation such as rehearsal and the generated slides also gives a guarantee that the slides are appropriate by some metric or algorithm which the soft- ware tool uses. This concept is explored in depth in the pa- per ¨ HyperSlides: Dynamic Presentation Prototyping¨ by Dar- ren Edge et al. [2]. It presents HyperSlides, a software tool which create slides for a user automatically. Content and

• ther styling is determined by a user through the use of a text

mark-up language which HyperSlides uses to add the content to the created slides. The slides created by HyperSlides are based on presentation theory and research and so are guaran- teed to be theoretically sound and so will be both appealing and flow and content will be appropriate and free of any tech- nical issues. The benefits of HyperSlides or any automation software comes at the cost of the loss of freedom to change the layout of the slides which may be inconvenient in some cases and also the need to use a mark-up language to create slides which could be difficult for users who are not compe- tent with computers. In evaluating HyperSlides the authors conducted a usability study with a group of 12 users in which they found 11 of the 12 users preferred creating slides using HyperSlides rather than with a basic PowerPoint tool, the au- thors chose users with a background in engineering and com- puter science for their testing, meaning that the concept of using a mark-up language was familiar to them. In evaluat- ing HyperSlides the authors found it to help in saving time, creating a more aesthetic layout and also helped with better

• rganising of ideas. These are all potential issues which could

arise when giving a presentation, by helping resolve these is- sues, HyperSlides or more generally, automated slide creation software, can be used to make presentations more successful. Another method for ensuring that slides are appropriate and free from issues is to view them from a metrics perspective. The paper ¨ Linearity and Synchrony: Quantitative Metrics for Slide-based Presentation Methodology¨ by Kazutaka Kurihara et al. [5] does just this. The paper uses metrics to answer the following questions: ¨ to what extent are the materials be- ing presented in the prepared order?¨ and ¨ What is the degree

• f separation between the displays of the presenter and the

audience?¨ the paper condenses these two questions down to the Linearity and Synchrony of slides, respectively. From there the authors create formulas to calculate the linearity and synchrony metrics of a slide based presentation. Linearity is a calculation of the movement of viewpoints by a presen- ter over a given time where a large linearity value indicates that an author is not covering their points to enough detail or that there is too much detail as indicated by a very low lin- earity value. Synchrony is a measurement of what is being displayed on the slides and the slides an audience member is currently viewing, for example if the presenter is on slide 5 and the audience member is still on slide 3 in their hand-out, then this can indicate that the audience members are losing focus or that a presenter is moving too quickly through their

• points. By introducing metrics as a way to determine how

appropriate and relevant a set of slides are to a presentation, a presenter is able to see if changes they make to a presen- tation help make a presentation more successful or not. This method could be more useful for presenters who do not want to fully automate their slide creation process but still want to know whether their presentation meets standards or has any

• issues. A slight problem here is that these two metrics alone

cannot determine if a set of slides is good or bad, for example the authors do not take into account the fact that the slides themselves could be visually unappealing. However, the pos- sibility of the use defining metrics for software slides can help a presenter find issues in their presentation which if resolved will lead to a more successful presentation. Another way of creating slides which is not commonly used, is to decide what to talk about first then create slides based

• n that, this bottom up style of creation helps plan what to

talk about better and also allows a presentation to feel more like a story. This concept of planning first then creating slides is presented the paper, ¨ TurningPoint: Narrative-Driven Pre- sentation Planning by Larissa Pschetz et al. [6] presents the idea of using TurningPoint, an add-in for Microsoft Power- Point 2013 which allows users to define a narrative, which is the basic story, for their presentation first, then mark where slides should go in relation to the narrative text from which slides and presentation notes are generated from. The stories are created based on 6 predefined narrative templates which TurningPoint allows users to use. The paper makes the point that it is the story, not the slides that will capture your audi- ences attention [3] as a reasoning for this approach to make a presentation more successful and backs up its claim with research into making a presentation feel more like a story. In testing out the software to determine if a story based pre- sentation was more effective than a regular presentation, the authors recruited 11 users who were competent in giving pre- sentations and asked them to use TurningPoint to create a presentation using any of the predefined narrative templates.

The authors then analysed which templates were successful

• r preferred by testers

A presentation may not always be linear, meaning that the flow of slides may not always go from one slides to the next,

• r may go to a completely different set of slides depending on

the situation or type of audience. If for example a presenter is presenting to a technical audience the slides for the pre- sentation may contain more technical detail however if they are presenting the same topic to a general audience then they will want to be less technical. Rather than creating two sets

• f slides, dynamic slides will allow the path of the slides in

a presentation to change at the presenters request. Other use- ful situations for dynamic slides is if a presenter is running

• ut of time towards the end of a presentation then they can

vary the slides on the fly to cover only the main points to save

• time. Currently there is not real support for such dynamic

presentations in slideware software. However the ability to accommodate for such presentations is explored in the paper NextSlidePlease as presented in the paper ¨ NextSlidePlease: Authoring and Delivering Agile Multimedia Presentations¨ by Ryan Spicer et al. [7]. NextSlidePlease uses directed graphs to create dynamic slides. These dynamic slides promotes both content reuse and time management. When compared to stan- dard PowerPoint presentations in a usability test which in- volved giving a long presentation over a short time span. It was found that users preferred to use NextSlidePlease, due to its ability to vary slides based on time remaining.

REHEARSAL OF PRESENTATION

Like most activities, practices makes perfect, this also goes for giving presentations. When preparing for a presentation it is important to practice so that a presenter is well prepared for what they are talking about. Normally software does not play a big role in this area, mostly common uses here are primitive, such as using recording software to record what a presenter is saying to play back later or a stopwatch to measure the length

• f the presentation. Use of basic software such as this can

fail to uncover serious flaws in the delivery of a presentation, such as a presenter talking too quickly, or not making enough eye contact with the audience. With the processing power

• f computers there is potential here to create useful software

which can help presenters in their presentations. By using software to collect data about a presentation such as audio and video of the presentation and using that data to understand what is currently wrong with the delivery of a presentation, a presentation can be made more successful in that a presenter is made aware of issues that they might have when delivering a presentation and can then work on those weak points when rehearing. The concept of using a computer to analyse a presentation is explored in the paper ¨ Presentation Sensei: A Presenta- tion Training System using Speech and Image Processing¨ by Kazutaka Kurihara et al. [4]. This paper looks into collect- ing the data of a presentation by recording the presentation through the use of a microphone and webcam to provide real time and also historical data of a presenter and presentation. This helps a presenter to analyse their presentation and to see issues when they occur and their progress over time. The key features mentioned in this paper as being emphasised in lit- erature to create good presentation is: the speaking rate, non- monotonous speech, good eye contact, not too much fillers and also good length of time for the presentation. However in actual analysis, Presentation Sensei did not perform well when compared to a human presentation expert detecting is- sues in a presentation, which the paper admits. In testing Presentation Sensei, the authors used presentation sensei on 3 test subjects and compared that with a human evaluator to count all the issues of the 3 subjects, each of whom gave a

• presentation. It was found that a very high number of issues

went undetected by the software. This is most likely due to Presentation Sensei still being in the early stages of develop- ment and still needing refinement. However, this also does show that there is potential for software to help make a pre- sentation more successful through the use of analysis and im- proving based on current weaknesses detected by a system. Learning and mastering the content of a presentation helps build the confidence of a presenter. These points are covered in the paper ¨ PitchPerfect: Integrated Rehearsal Environment for Structured Presentation Preparation¨ by Ha Trinh et al. [8] aims to build the confidence in a presenter through the use

• f their tool PitchPerfect, the paper makes valid claims that

not having confidence in a presentation gives way to criti- cal issues such as too much content on slides due to being afraid of forgetting points and other issues such as not prac- ticing enough, leading to poor performance. PitchPerfect in- volves automated software creation similar to Hyperslides but more importantly offers a training system to help a user re- hearse their presentation over time, as opposed to a system which analyses data against set values such as Presentation

• Sensei. The training system in PitchPerfect looks into ¨

cued- recall testing ¨ which involves two modes, the first method in- volves showing a presenter visual elements of a point they will talk about in a presentation and then prompting the pre- senter to recall what set of notes is associated with the ele-

• ment. The paper claims that this will help increase the con-

fidence of a presenter to remember their slides and also help them work in a high pressure environment such as that en- countered when giving a presentation. The second method of ¨ cued-recall testing¨ ınvolves helping a presenter remember the

• rder of the content they are talking about, through prompting

a user to identify which element comes next in their presen-

• tation. This helps presenters remember the order of their pre-

sentation and also to familiarise themselves with the presenta- tion more. The second training method is ¨ scaffold speech re- hearsal ¨ which lets a presenter practice their presentation under timed conditions. This training scheme organises the notes of a single point to a presentation into a single page and asks the author to recall them. By having all the notes on a single page it allows to allows a presenter to practice the flow be- tween slides when talking about a point and also to help com- mit their presentation to memory. Improving through gradual training rather that reacting to issues as they arise such as in Presentation Sensei could be more user friendly and provide better results in the long term. Both are valid and contribute to making a presentation more successful through detection and removal of issues a presenter has in delivering a presentation.

FINAL PRESENTATION

The final presentation is when the presentation is finally

• given. It is important here to use to put the work done in

preparation to use. However it can be difficult to remember points of a presentation, which is why PowerPoint slides are

• used. However if a presentation involves something like a

demonstration or a video, slides can become essentially use- less as there is no way to integrate slides with video timings. It can be disastrous when giving a demonstration and a pre- senter forgets to talk about a key point in the demonstration because they forgot. Issues like these hinder the success of a presentation. Tools such as DemoWiz as outlined in the paper ¨ DemoWiz: Re-Performing Software Demonstrations for a Live Presenta- tion¨ by Pei-Yu Chi et al. [1] can assist in overcoming issues related to demonstrations by providing a software tool which has two views, the audience view and the presenter view, the presenter view is only seen by the presenter and has notes and timing icons which pop up during the course of a demon- stration, this helps to remember all the key points of a demo without having unnecessary notes shown to the audience. By using such a tool, presentation is made clearer and demonstra- tions will be more likely to be understood and comprehended by the audience. Tools such as this can help make a demon- stration go more smoothly however does take extra time to set up which may not be possible for a presenter. Also a cal- ibration process is needed to adjust the timings to a demon- strations to suit what the presenter wants. In evaluating De- moWiz the authors conducted a usability test which measured demonstration timings and also reception to the tool. It was found that DemoWiz was the preferred tool during evaluation when compared to a standard video player. This indicates that the use of annotated videos can help in making a presentation more successful.

FUTURE WORK

In future, software presentation tools should look into how software can analyse a presentation better and guide a pre- senter though the whole process. Possible through an all in

• ne tool which helps a presenter at all stages in making a
• presentation. Combining tools such as HyperSlides, Presen-

tation Sensei and DemoWiz into a single software could be seen as more beneficial these all in one tools would be much more useful than using multiple tools. Also a lot of the tools being developed are integrated with Microsoft PowerPoint using their API, in the future it could be beneficial to users if Microsoft integrated the tools into their product if they are deemed useful or even give users the ability to access the tools as plugins for PowerPoint.

CONCLUSION

This report has looked into presentation software and what can be changed to make presentations more successful. It has explained issues and problems facing such software. The re- port has focused on three main areas of a presentation. In the creation of the presentation slides the different approaches to creating slides automatically were covered. Rehearsing and practicing the presentation explained training systems which presenters could use to improve presentations and finally in the delivering the presentation section the issues of demon- strations and videos in presentations was addressed.

REFERENCES

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Re-performing software demonstrations for a live

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