Today, use of PowerPoint presentation (Keynote or any other presentation format) to present your idea is quite common. One starts interacting with presentations from school days and journey continues throughout your life. Sometimes you view presentations and sometimes you have to create them to be viewed by others.
Be it some conference, event, college seminar, meeting, workshop or a training session, nothing is complete without an outstanding presentation. A great presentation backed by great speaker leaves long lasting impact on audience. People spend hours & days to work out that great presentation which audience can wow.
One of the major elements of a presentation is the template you use. It's well known fact that an average idea presented well can outperform a great idea that is presented poorly. Can you afford to loose VC funding for your start-up just because you weren't able to represent the information and business plan rightly through your presentation. Besides targeted content you need a right blend of theme, images, graphs and other placeholders collectively known as template. But the question is what type of presentation template you need. It might be easy for you to decide whether it would be a business, education or a medical template but do you ever think what sort of images, objects or maps your template should have so that you have that creative liberty to make a mark through your presentation. Here is what you need to take care while buying a template:
Do you need a template having vector images or one with bitmap images?
If you create presentations quite often, you must have faced the problem of distortion and loss of quality of images when you re-size them. Mostly this happens when you try to enlarge a small image. Problem is grave when picture enlarged has some text on it. However, you must have noticed same is not true for clip art images/icons you insert from gallery. You enlarge them, re-size them without any loss of quality.
In order to understand this we need to understand the type of images. There are two type of images i) Bitmap (raster) ii) Vector graphics or images. Most common formats we use on daily basis like JPEG, PNG, GIF, TIF, PNG, BMP are all bitmap images. Bitmap is collection of tiny squares called pixels, which together form a pattern called image. Each pixel has its own color. When we try to enlarge a bitmap image beyond certain extant these small squares become visible and the edges
become jagged or blurry.
Bitmap image pixlated |
Vector graphics are made up of lines, curves, rectangles and other shapes. Vector image is a file containing instructions for drawing it. Biggest advantage of vector graphics over bitmap is that
a image can be enlarged or re-sized without any loss of quality. Some popular Vector file formats include WMF, EPS, AI, EMF, CDR
- Color of the whole vector graphic or its part can be changed
- Shape of vector image can be modified
- Vector images can be transparent
- Vector images can be shrunk or enlarged to any extend without any loss of quality
So when you look for a cool template for your next presentation, you should think for a while to decide if you need a template having bitmap images (JPG,PNG) or Vector images so that you can tweak them, re-size them, ungroup them to suit your presentation needs. Most of PowerPoint template providers gives you the option of downloading a template with either vector or bitmap images.