A presentation conveys information from a speaker to an audience. Presentations are typically demonstrations, introduction, lecture, or speech meant to inform, persuade, inspire, motivate, build goodwill, or present a new idea/product. Presentations usually require preparation, organization, event planning, writing, use of visual aids, dealing with stress, and answering questions. “The key elements of a presentation consists of presenter, audience, message, reaction and method to deliver speech for organizational success in an effective manner.” Presentations are widely used in tertiary work settings such as accountants giving a detailed report of a company's financials or an entrepreneur pitching their venture idea to investors. The term can also be used for a formal or ritualized introduction or offering, as with the presentation of a debutante. Presentations in certain formats are also known as keynote address. Interactive presentations, in which the audience is involved, are also represented more and more frequently. Instead of a monologue, this creates a dialogue between the speaker and the audience. The advantages of an interactive presentation is for example, that it attracts more attention from the audience and that the interaction creates a sense of community.
A presentation program is commonly used to generate the presentation content, some of which also allow presentations to be developed collaboratively, e.g. using the Internet by geographically disparate collaborators. Presentation viewers can be used to combine content from different sources into one presentation. Some of the popular presentation products used across the globe are offered by Apple, Google and Microsoft.
Microsoft PowerPoint and Google Slides are effective tools to develop slides, though Google Slides allows groups to work together using Google Drive to update each account as it is edited. Content such as text, images, links, and effects are added into each of the presentation programs to deliver useful, consolidated information to a group.