Presentation program

supplemental to a strong aural presentation that accompanies the slide show, but in many cases, such as statistical graphics, it can be difficult to convey essential information other than by visual means; additionally, a well-designed infographic can be extremely effective in a way that words are not.

Using Autographix and Dicomed, it became quite easy[dubious – discuss] to make last-minute changes compared to traditional typesetting and pasteup.

As these programs became more common in the late 1980s several companies set up services that would accept the shows on diskette and create slides using a film recorder or print transparencies.

[citation needed] The first commercial computer software specifically intended for creating WYSIWYG presentations was developed at Hewlett-Packard in 1979 and called BRUNO and later HP-Draw.

[5] A presentation program is supposed to help both the speaker with an easier access to his ideas and the participants with visual information which complements the talk.

Presentation programs can either supplement or replace the use of older visual-aid technology, such as pamphlets, handouts, chalkboards, flip charts, posters, slides and overhead transparencies.

Text, graphics, movies, and other objects are positioned on individual pages or "slides" or "foils"[citation needed].

With the growth of digital photography and video, many programs that handle these types of media also include presentation functions for displaying them in a similar "slide show" format, for example iPhoto.