The Truth About PowerPoint

I learned many new things concerning PowerPoint presentations from these three articles. The article "Really Bad PowerPoint and How to Avoid it" was a very useful article. I found it funny that the good examples for Microsoft slides are exactly what you do not want to do. I also found it funny that reading off your slides was considered the kiss of death.
These are my five most important guidelines for your power point presentation.
1. Do not have to much information on your page. The audience doesn't want to spend the whole time reading paragraphs on your slide. It also takes away from the attention you get during your presentation.

2. Do not use fonts in which it is hard to read because of the style or color. You don't want to make the audience spend time trying to read your slides.

3. Do not use clip art. At a serious level nothing says unprofessional more than clip art.

4. Do not use slide transitions in which it takes twenty minutes to get all of the information visable on your slide. The audience doesn't want to have to wait for your slide to appear.

5. Do not use to many sounds or other audio. This also makes your presentation seem childish and unprofessional.

Make it simple and full of interesting visual aids that have to do with your presentation.

Search Engines

I learned many new things about search engines in the presentation. I thought one part of the presentation that was very interesting was how search engines rank websites. Google actually weights websites to determine which ones are most useful. Google will also send automotive bots to scan the pages to find key terms. Usually the more key terms the more useful the article is for your topic.

Another thing I learned was how to classify your search. For example, I did not know you could type site: - .com and restrict your search to non .com websites. There are also advanced searches that allow you to limit your search. I learned how to use search engines more effectively and efficiently from the presentation.

Copyright

As the world grows technologically, so do the number of digital files that consist of movies, songs, and many other things. This allows people to easily copy files without costing money or losing quality. Copyright has become a much larger issue because of the easiness to copy files.

I learned many new things concerning copyright and plagiarism from the presentation. First, I learned that the RIAA doesn't care if you have copied 1 or 1,000 songs, they still can catch you and charge you. Secondly, I learned of the dangers of copying files through limewire and the penalties that go with it. Another interesting fact I took away from the presentation was the law that gives rights to the author through their lifetime and 75 years after their death.

An issue concerning copyright is whether Disney should be able to keep their characters out of the public domain and continue to hold their rights. Disney believes they should be able to keep the rights to their characters, while other people want to be able to publicly use the characters Walt Disney created.

My stance on this issue is that they should not create a law extending rights for all works, but that if the certain subject is still making money for the company than that company should continue to hold their rights. Disney should be able to hold the copyrights to their characters until they stop making money or they give them up.

Excel Skills

I learned many things about excel that I did not know before. Almost all the equations were new to me. I also learned how to format cells and charts in creative and exciting ways. I found it easy to use excel to balance check books and/or figure out pay roll. I will definitely use the skills I have learned in excel in other classes such as Chemistry and Accounting and perhaps use them in my future career in Business.