It is 4 p.m., and a team from Elder Care Services Corporation has two hours before it departs for a business trip to England. Its mission is to raise money to build a luxury retirement community. To deliver their pitch, representatives will use a slide presentation put together by Sharon , the Mass., firm's senior planner. But the slide show is not ready. is waiting for the financial department to supply the numbers for a few remaining graphs.
"No problem," she says . "I'll be handing out slides as people ar walking out the door." No, the slides are not en route from a graphics art house. Rather, they will be designed, photographed and mounted at 's desk. From beginning to end, she will spend just 10 minutes and less than $1 each to create slides that have the professional touch of an outside service. The old way would have cost her about $35 per slide and taken five days.
Once again, the personal computer is making affordable what used to be a high-ticket item. With a PC and $2,000 invested in slide-making software and accessory hardware, is in control. "I can do what I want when I want without worrying about money," she says. Churning out up to five slide presentations a month is no sweat for this demographic analyst, who "can't draw a straight line with a ruler."
Mark initially got into graphics to enhance his productivity. As assistant to the president of Southwestern Bell in Birmingham, Ala., one of his duties is to track the number and nature of customer complaints. With Chart-Master, a $375 program from Ashton-Tate, Inc., Torrance, Calif., he produces monthly graphs and updates them daily so he can quickly spot emerging trends.
When it is time to present his findings to upper management, converts the graphs into color handouts and overhead transparencies. "I probably expend more energy than necessary to get the graphs to look exactly how I want," he says. But to him the effort is worth it. "I can paint my message better in pictures than I can in words."
If you are new to PC graphics, it is best to start out with the minimum investment, advises Allen , president of AUI Data Graphics, the Arlington, Va., consulting division of Computer Associates International Inc. Stick to an entry-level graphics package and a black-and-white dot matrix printer. Once you feel comfortable with the look and feel of the software, you can consider investing in some of the more elaborate hardware.
While searching for software, keep in mind that 90 percent of the graphics used for business presentations consist of word charts, such as bulleted text outlines, diagrams and tables, says . Line, pie, bar and organizational charts account for 7 percent, with predrawn pictures making up the rest.
Most of the top-selling beginers' programs are a breeze to operate. You specify a chart type, colors and typeface, add the needed labels and data and instruct the software to draw. If you are a novice, however, you will want to pick up a handbook or get some guidance on how to use color for maximum impact.
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At the high end of the market are programs designed for graphics personnel, like SuperImage ($495) from Computer Associates International Inc., San Diego. It is a drawing system that also lets you enhmace, rather than create, charts and graphs from other PC Packages. With SuperImage you can change an object's color, size and position to customize an image for a specific audience.
Cathleen, an independent commercial real estate broker in Anaheim, Calif., gives high marks to Diagraph ($395), a line and wordcharting program from Computer Support Corporation, Carollton, Tex. uses Diagraph to produce brochures that, she says, "amaze people once they find out they were done on a PC.c Diagraph is the first piece of software "I didn't need training for," she says.
The programs may be simple to use, but getting your computer ready to run them may take some doing. Much depends on your PC brand. The Apple Macintosh comes out of the box ready to geneate and display graphics. The present generation of IBM PCs and compatibles need to be brought up to speed with a plug-in graphics board, such as the $299 Hercules Graphics Card for standard monochrome displays.
Most programs, however, are designed for full color presentations. Cards that accommodate four simultaneous colors cost about $250; those handling up to u6 go for more than $500. With both, you will also need a color monitor, which can add as much as $850 to the price of the upgrade.
PC graphics can be presented on paper, overhead transparencies, slides or a monitor. In deciding on a format, let you audience be the guide. Your standards for internal presentations, for instance, are likely to be less stringent than those for a sales pitch to a prospective client.
For modest presentations--black-and-white paper handouts and transparencies--the PC's most common companion is a dot matrix printer. Epson, NEC and Toshiba, among others, continue to edge dot matrix technology close to letter quality
For a sharper black-and-white image that rivals typeset copy, you might consider a laser printer. Once priced beyond the reach of small companies, laser printers are fast becoming affordable components for producing text and graphics in-house.
A color printer need not break your budget either: Xerox Corporation recently set a nw standard with the introduction of a seven-color ink-jet printer priced at $1,595. Dot matrix color printers, which are less brilliant than ink-jets but good all-around office printers, sell for similar prices.
Creating transparencies from graphics software is fairly straightforward. After Mark makes an on-screen chart, he simply slips a transparent sheet in his color plotter and presses the draw button. For black and white, he send the picture to a dot matrix printer and copies it onto a transparency loaded in a photocopier.
When only the best will do, you need 35mm slides, the slickest medium for business presentations--until now, also a luxury for small businesses. If you have ordered slides from a graphics shop you know how expensive and timeconsuming the procedure can be. A slide costs from $25 for a simple sketch to $200 for complex graphics. Delivery is typically five days, and if the results are not what you expected, you may have to pay a premium of 100 to 300 percent for a rush job.
A PC gives you two other options: You can buy the hardware to make slides yourself, or you can send PC-generated graphics to a service bureau to be turned into finished products.
The advantages of making slides inhouse are greater security, quick turnaround and creative control, says consultant . High-volume slide producers also reap long-term savings, but some of that cash may have to go to hiring a full-time person to handle the work.
Shooting slides from a PC requires a minimum investment of $2,000 for a film recorder. Elder Care's uses the Polariod Palette--the most popular film recorder on the market--which sells for $1,999 and includes an automatic processor for instant slide film and amounting kit. The Palette's 35mm camera enhances images so they come out four times sharper than what you see on a standard computer screen.
Using 35mm Express on an IBM AT computer, snaps up to 12 exposures at a time and processes them at her desk in 24 minutes. One slide, she estimates, costs 90 cents to produce, a fraction of the $35 she used to pay to a commercial graphics house. With a new type of film, she can also use the palette to snap large format transparencies that can be displayed at nearly standard size on an adapted overhead projector.
The quality of PC-made slides depends on the film recorder. The higher the record's resolution measured by the number of lines that make up the picture, the crisper the image. The resolution of film recorders varies widely, as do their prices. For $5,995, you can make sparkling 2,000-line resolution slides with equipment from General Parametrics Corporation, Berkeley, Calif. And, at the low end of the spectrum, simple screen cameras selling for about $800 capture images just as they appear on the computer screen.
The Palette may be adequate for formal presentations-- has no complaints--but don't sell quality short, urges .
He cites the case of a firm that used a low cost film recorder for a presentation to an important customer. "Today, no one in the firm will accept responsibility forthe purchase, and the equipment is collecting dust," he says.
Finanlly, you can go for a simulated slide show. You will need a special slide show package that lets you capture images created with other products and edit them into slow-moving picture presentations, even incorporating special effects.
Presentations on a PC screen can work well for a group of three or four. For a larger audience you can use a standard television screen, a projection TV or special video equipment that beams images to a large film screen.
For the ultimate "lights, camera, action" effect, General Parametrics offers VideoShow--a shoebox-sized unit that both creates and displays 2,000-line resolution pictures on a projection screen. With a base price of $4,595, VideoShow is primarily used by large corporations.
Even if you are not a trained artist, you can create informative and eyecatching presentations.
Increasingly, graphics software comes bundled with an ensemble of tools--such as pre-drawn pictures and layouts--that demand little artistic talent to use. With the growing array of no-fuss software and low-cost accessory hardware, you no longer have to be a big business to make a winning presentation.
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