Visual aids, or more specifically, slides, have through necessity and standard use become part and parcel of the technical presentation. A good presentation depends on appropriate slides to support the discussion. Poor slides will either detract from or interfere with the presentation.

Various aspects of slides include:

• The look-and-feel of the slides;
• The typeface, font, and language of the text;
• Images (graphics and photographs);
• Imaged-based data representations: charts and graphs;
• Text-based data representations: tables, statistics, equations, code, quotes
• Presentation software.

Each of these will be discussed in the following sections.