Introduction
June 8th, 2005
Science communication has been always heavily reliant on images, drawings, charts and diagrams. The growing complexity of life sciences in particular puts an increasing pressure on scientists, health professionals and students to clearly communicate their scientific results and present ideas and hypothesis in a way that is easily grasped by the audience. In the broad field of biomedical sciences, where images are essential part of almost any presentation, skillfully crafted drawings, charts or diagrams can make a critical difference in conveying the message in lecture or seminar room. Pictures speak a thousands words, however few scientist take time to develop themselves slides representing complex structural, cellular and anatomical objects. Understandably so, they just take too much time to make and often require good knowledge of more advanced graphical software.
Although PowerPoint is a dominant medium in scientific presentations, most users usually do not take full advantage of its potential. When trying to envision complex cellular and histological objects and their cartoon representations, PowerPoint users tend to think more about advanced graphical software packages for art professionals rather tan PowerPoint, and only few realize that PowerPoint has adequate set of basic tools to create high quality slides depicting objects in life sciences. This is especially true for PowerPoint XP/2003 which has many critical enhancements over 2000 version, including blending, transparency and antialiasing. These new, though still basic tools are quite easy to master and if used creatively, may be quite sufficient for producing even complex drawings.
In this Journal we will describe how to use PowerPoint to make good-looking objects and slides in Biology and Medicine. We will publish on a bi-weekly basis tutorials, tips and techniques on how to use both simple and more advanced PowerPoint features to generate complex visual material for lectures and seminars. We also would like to invite you to share with us and with all PowerPoint users tricks and techniques that you may think may be useful for other scientists and students.