Thread: Digital Presentations !!

Hi, friends i want to ask that the "Digital Presentations" made by using flash or with power point help us in any field ? I mean, can a "Mechanical Engineering" student gain something from Digital presentions if he knows how to make them ?? can this help him out in his projects, if he wants to display/show what he has actually learned in some specific topic ?? because someone told me that digital presentations are only useful to students who are doing "IT Engineering" or else to those who are doing some Management Studies ??

Can someone just clear all these doubts !!
I'll be really Thankful to you !! ^_^

don't know where your friend got his opinion from, but in the world where i live, trying to give a presentation without powerpoint or something similar is like to going to war without a gun

Strangely enough 7 years ago it was still acceptable to present a journal club using transparencies. And somehow it became unacceptable within a matter of years.

Imagine is everything. Content is optional.

I just came from an online "Live Meeting" on steam system design, where the presenter was in Princeton, NJ and his audiences were in Boise, Denver and elsewhere around the country. We all viewed his Powerpoint slide and listened to his commentary.

Engineering without Powerpoint is like Cinco de Mayo without beans.

Thanks guys !! but what about the flash based presentations, i think even it is equivalent to that of powerpoint or it can be like, after making a Flash based presentation we can add it in Power Point slides. To give it more efficient, effective and attractive look !! What do you guys think ?? ^_^
:-D

the trouble with flash is to know when to stop showing off, otherwise you annoy your public for being - well - too flash

Absolutely. I just spent this morning evaluating a group of engineers who were presenting their analyses of some example case studies with PowerPoint. In terms of the the PowerPoint aspect of their presentation I was looking for clarity and consistency. Fancy animations, colours or sound effects would have been marked down severely unless they genuinely added something relevant to the presentation.

On the other hand a couple of the best presentations I've ever delivered were when I had computer failure and had to deliver my talk with a flip chart and some waving arms. Contrary to Marshall Macluhan the medium is not the message, if you have a powerful message, directed to its target and clearly delivered. But on a day to day basis PowerPoint is the lifeblood of selling an idea. Just keep them short - your audience will love you for that. And open with a genuine executive summary - they'll love you for ever for that.

Power Point (or similar tools like Open Office Impress) is the state-of-the-art presentation medium in astrophysics as well. From all the scientists I know, only maybe a handful are still using transparencies. It is the perfect choice, if you want to support theoretical details and results by plots, images or animations of model calculations. However, I think, it should only be the tool to transport the message. I find it quite annoying and rather unprofessional, if someone is trying to show off with all kinds of fancy gimmicks. And a bad talk isn't just better, because the speaker uses PPT. I have seen really appalling examples. Yuck!

A big advantage is that presentations can be easily edited, even almost on time e.g in order to react on other presentations during a conference.

well, nobody would use transparencies in a conference. I just wanted to point out that nowadays even for informal meetings powerpoint is the norm, although it costs a lot of time to make a good presentation this way.

Because the problem is that with transparencies people do not expect a professional presentation. But once you start with powerpoint the expectation levels change.

And the switch actually has increased the workload attached to giving an informal presentation a great deal in my job. I know people who actually work for a full week on a single presentation for a labmeeting.

In the old days it was just a few hours the day before.

It's a good tool though. My collaborator and I use the powerpoint presentation to great effect. For meetings with the top boss we spend a lot of time on our presentation because the outcome will mean whether we will get the ok or not to spend a lot of money on experiments. So we work on these presentations for a long time and discuss them at length.

In the old days we would just go to the boss with a few printouts and a story.

Now we try to dazzle the boss.

The modern era of superficiality.

Originally Posted by spuriousmonkey

The modern era of superficiality.

True, everything is superficial nowadays. Even if the content on the transparency is valid, no one would pay attention to it and would even cast it off as a sloppy job not worth looking at.

To me however, transparency brings back memories :P