to interested audience members. In summary, be organized, be well prepared, get right to
the point when giving an oral presentation, and consider the needs and expectation of your
listeners.
Now a few words about PowerPoint presentations. As all of you know, you can use
PowerPoint to generate and organize your slides showing text, charts, graphs, and video
clips. With PowerPoint, you can also create supplementary materials (such as handouts) for
your audience and preparatory notes for your presentation. PowerPoint offers a number of
attractive templatesand layout optionsthat you can use. Moreover, for formal presentations,
you may want to include your university or organization logo and the date on the bottom
of every slide in your presentation. As you may know, to do this, you need to create a slide
masterfirst. Animationis yet another way of adding visual and sound effects to your slides.
For example, you can show a bulleted list of items one at a time or you can have each item
fade away as you move to the next item. Slide transitionoptions can also give your slide pre-
sentations sound and visual effects as one slide disappears and the next slide appears. You
may also consider using action buttons, which allow you to move to a specific slide in
another PowerPoint file, Word document, or Excel file, without having to leave your cur-
rent presentation to access the file. The action button is linked to the file, and upon click-
ing it, you automatically will go to this file containing the desired slide or document.
Finally, as we said earlier, after you prepare your presentation, you need to rehearse your
presentation before you deliver it to a live audience. Another reason for rehearsing your
presentation is that, typically, engineering presentations must be made within an allotted
time period. PowerPoint offers a rehearse timingoption that allows you to time your
presentation.4.7 Engineering Graphical Communication
In the previous sections, we showed you how to present your homework solutions and to write
technical and progress reports, an executive summary, and short memos. Now, we discuss
engineering graphical communications. Engineers use special kinds of drawings, called engi-
neering drawings, to convey their ideas and design information about products. These draw-
ings portray vital information, such as shape of the product, its size, type of material used,
and assembly steps. Moreover, machinists use the information provided by engineers or drafts
persons, on the engineering drawings, to make the parts. For complicated systems made of
various parts, the drawings also serve as a how-to-assemble guide, showing how the various parts
fit together. Examples of these types of drawings are shown in Figures 4.3 through 4.5. In
Chapter 16, we provide an introduction to engineering graphical-communication principles.
We will discuss why engineering drawings are important, how they are drawn, and what rules
must be followed to create such drawings. Engineering symbols and signs also provide valuable
information. These symbols are a “language” used by engineers to convey their ideas, solutions
to problems, or analyses of certain situations. In Chapter 16, we will also discuss the need for
conventional engineering symbols and will show some common symbols used in civil, electri-
cal, and mechanical engineering.4.7 Engineering Graphical Communication 101
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