Business Presentation Software

Course Description

Business Presentation Software has students develop and design graphical presentations using Microsoft PowerPoint. The course covers both fundamental and sophisticated features to create computer-generated slide presentations suitable for business contexts and internet-based virtual presentations.

Within the SCNS taxonomy, OST is the Office Systems Technology prefix. Daytona State publishes this at 1 credit, offered spring, giving approximately 15 contact hours at the institution's lecture convention.

This is a one-credit course and it addresses something almost everyone does badly. Presentation software is used constantly and taught almost never, with the result that a great deal of professional communication happens through slides that actively work against the speaker. The single most valuable idea in this course is that the slides are not the talk — they are support for a person who is speaking, and a deck that can be read on its own has usually replaced the presenter rather than helped them.

Daytona State does not publish a lecture and laboratory split for this course. Its computing and office systems courses are unsuffixed and run at the standard 15 contact hours per credit — CEN4010, CEN3722, CNT2402, OST2401 and CGS1570 are all live at 3 credits and 45 hours. This course is priced at that convention.

Learning Outcomes

Required Outcomes

• Plan a presentation around its audience and purpose.
• Structure a presentation with a clear narrative.
• Distinguish what belongs on a slide from what belongs in the talk.
• Create and edit slides efficiently.
• Use slide masters and layouts for consistency.
• Apply and modify themes and templates.
• Apply typography and visual hierarchy effectively.
• Use colour purposefully and check contrast.
• Insert and format images, shapes, and diagrams.
• Create charts that represent data honestly.
• Build tables and simplify them for legibility.
• Apply transitions and animation purposefully and sparingly.
• Insert and manage audio and video.
• Use speaker notes and presenter view.
• Apply accessibility features, including alternative text and reading order.
• Design slides legible from the back of a room and on a small screen.
• Prepare a presentation for virtual delivery.
• Share, export, and print a presentation appropriately.
• Manage file size and embedded media.
• Rehearse and time a presentation.
• Deliver a presentation confidently without reading the slides.
• Handle questions and technical failure calmly.
• Adapt a presentation for different audiences and time limits.
• Critique a presentation constructively.

Optional Outcomes

• Describe presentation design principles in depth.
• Describe data visualisation for presentation.
• Describe recording and narrating a presentation.
• Describe interactive and non-linear presentations.
• Describe alternative presentation tools.
• Describe presenting to remote and hybrid audiences.

Major Topics

Required Topics

• Audience and purpose
• Narrative structure
• Slide content versus spoken content
• Efficient slide creation
• Slide masters and layouts
• Themes and templates
• Typography and hierarchy
• Colour and contrast
• Images, shapes, and diagrams
• Honest charting
• Tables and legibility
• Purposeful animation
• Audio and video
• Speaker notes and presenter view
• Accessibility
• Legibility at distance and on small screens
• Preparing for virtual delivery
• Sharing, exporting, printing
• File size and embedded media
• Rehearsal and timing
• Delivery without reading
• Questions and technical failure
• Adapting to audience and time
• Constructive critique

Optional Topics

• Presentation design principles
• Data visualisation
• Recording and narration
• Interactive presentations
• Alternative tools
• Remote and hybrid audiences

Resources & Tools

• The software itself, and daily use of it — office application fluency comes from hours, and students frequently have free or heavily discounted access to the full professional suite through the college.
• Microsoft Learn and the application's own help — free, current, and better than most tutorials.
• Microsoft Office Specialist certification — employers name it in advertisements, testing centres are widely available, and it is one of the cheapest credentials that demonstrably affects hiring for administrative roles.
• Purdue OWL (owl.purdue.edu) — free; the best available reference on business and professional writing.
• Your college writing centre — free, and business writing is a skill that responds quickly to feedback.
• Real documents. Volunteer to produce a newsletter, a report, or a presentation for a club or a community organisation — a portfolio of real work beats any exercise.

Career Pathways

• Executive secretary and executive administrative assistant — SOC 43-6011.
• Secretaries and administrative assistants — SOC 43-6014; a very large occupation, and one where demonstrated software fluency separates candidates immediately.
• Medical secretary and administrative assistant — SOC 43-6013; a substantial Florida sector.
• Legal secretary and administrative assistant — SOC 43-6012.
• Office and administrative support supervisor — SOC 43-1011; a realistic progression.
• Office manager and business operations support.
• Human resources, accounting, and project support roles — administrative experience plus software fluency is a common route into all three.
• Data entry, records, and information management.
• Customer service and client-facing coordination roles.
• ⚠ The pathway upward runs through added skill, not through time served. Certification, advanced spreadsheet ability, and specialised terminology — medical or legal — are what move people from entry-level administrative work into better-paid roles.

Special Information

⚠⚠ The slides are not the talk — and reading them is the commonest failure

• An audience cannot read and listen at the same time. A slide full of text means they read it, ignore you, finish before you do, and then wait — which is why dense slides make a good speaker worse.
• ⚠ Never read your slides aloud. It is the single most common presentation failure, and audiences find it insulting even when they cannot say why.
• Put the detail in the speaker notes or a handout, not on the slide. If the deck has to work as a document, write a document — a deck that works alone and a deck that supports a speaker are different artefacts.
• One idea per slide. If a slide needs a paragraph to explain it, it is two slides.
• Make it legible from the back of the room and on a phone. Large type, high contrast, few words — and test it on the actual screen where you can.
• Use images that carry meaning, not decoration; stock photography adds nothing and costs attention.
• ⚠ Animation and transitions are almost always a distraction. The defensible use is revealing something in sequence to control attention; everything else is noise.
• Rehearse aloud and time it. Almost every presentation runs long, and cutting during delivery is where people panic.
• ⚠ Plan for the technology failing. Know your material well enough to deliver without slides, bring the file in a second format, and never let a projector problem derail a presentation you know.

⚠ Accessibility and honest charts — two things that separate professional decks

• Add alternative text to images and meaningful diagrams, so the deck works for people using assistive technology — and note that decks are increasingly circulated as documents afterwards.
• Check the reading order of slide elements; the visual order and the order assistive technology follows are not automatically the same.
• ⚠ Never use colour as the only carrier of meaning. Colour vision deficiency is common, and projectors distort colour badly — label the series as well as colouring it.
• Check contrast. Designs that look elegant on a laptop are frequently unreadable on a washed-out projector in a lit room.
• Caption embedded video, and do not rely on audio that a room may not hear.
• ⚠ Do not truncate a chart axis to exaggerate a difference. A bar chart not starting at zero makes a small change look dramatic, and doing it deliberately in a business presentation is a credibility risk as well as a misrepresentation.
• Choose the chart for the question — pie charts compare badly, dual axes invite false correlation, and 3D effects distort area and add nothing.
• Label directly where you can, rather than making the audience map a legend onto the chart while you talk.
• Show the denominator and say what the data is and when it is from.

How Florida course levels affect transfer

The first digit of an SCNS number denotes the year of offering, not transferability. Courses at the 1000 and 2000 levels transfer transparently between Florida public institutions, and 3000 to 4000 is unproblematic since both are upper division. The boundary that actually matters is 2000 to 3000, where lower-division credit generally cannot satisfy an upper-division requirement — and it is live here, since Daytona State offers both associate-level and bachelor of science coursework in these prefixes.

OST2828 is 1 credit and approximately 15 contact hours, offered spring only at Daytona State.

A short course on something almost everyone does badly — and the skill is visible in every job interview and every meeting afterwards.