PowerPoint Presentations: Tips To Avoid Last Minute Surprises
The PowerPoint tips featured here are not about creating better or more effective presentations, instead they help you avoid any last minute surprises that may crop up when an eager audience is waiting to see your slide show.
*They are all based on my personal experiences at a recent BarCamp.
Tip 1: Put the PPT files on a USB Drive
Yes, there’s box.net, slideshare.net and tons of other PowerPoint hosting services where you can upload your PPT files but I still recommend carrying files on a USB drive because there are chances that Internet may be very slow (or unavailable) in the presentation room. With files on the USB stick, you are always in control.
Tip 2: Use Arial or Times New Roman Font
The default fonts in Office 2007 programs are Calibri, Corbel, Cambria, etc but unfortunately these fonts are not available on computers running older version of Microsoft Office. If you want the presentations to look the same in the conference room as on your laptop, use fonts like Arial or Times New Roman which are universally available.
Tip 3: Always Carry the Microsoft PowerPoint Viewer
You have designed a great presentation using the latest PowerPoint 2007 but it possible that the computer, where you will run the presentation, is running an ancient copy of PowerPoint 2000. In that case, your presentation will fail to run. not run at all.
Download the free Powerpoint 2007 Viewer, transfer it your USB drive and be rest assured that your slide show will be play just perfect on any Windows computer.
Tip 4: Print a PDF of your PowerPoint Presentation
You can use Acrobat or the Save as PDF plugin of Microsoft Office 2007 to convert your PPT into a read only PDF file. Some members in the audience will always ask you for a copy of the Presentation slides and if you are not too happy in giving away the source file, PDF is a great alternative - it also maintains the layout, transitions and even the fonts.
Tip 5: Take Care of Margins
If the display properties of your computer do not match that of the projector, chances are that the presentation slides will be cut off at the edges - to avoid this, designate a margin safe area when designing presentations and limit your text or graphics to that area.
Tip 6: Some Presentation Rooms Can Be Very Big
Do not use small fonts as that will make your slides unreadable especially for back-benchers when the room size is large. The minimum recommended font size in PPT slides is around 24-points (more for headings).
Tip 7: Screensavers, IMs, New Email Notifications
Turn Off all these distractions before running the slideshow - they can sometimes be very embarrassing.
Tip 8: Power Management
Some computers (especially laptops) turn off the screen after 5-10 minutes of inactivity. Always turn off this feature using the Power management console.
PowerPoint Troubleshooting Tips:
(a) If the computer is not recognizing the USB drive, make sure the necessary Windows service is running.
(b) If you are doing an FTP transfer of the PPT file from your web server and it is turning out to be junk, chances are that the transfer is in ASCII mode. Type “bi” on the FTP prompt to initiate a Binary transfer. Thanks guys.
Related: Reduce Size of PowerPoint Files
Subscribe in a reader
These are really life saving tips!
Anurag
Here is a tip regarding using SLideShare when the network might be slow/unavailable. I always run through the presentation once (in full screen) before getting to the talk venue so that it gets cached on my comp. That way my slides load up immediately and network speed does not matter!
Enjoy your blog.
I always save my presentation as a pdf for the reason mentioned, but also to use in case my computer fails and I have to use an unfamiliar computer, then I can flip through the pages of the pdf instead of ditching my Ppt altogether. It isn’t as dynamic as the Ppt, but it is at least a visual.
I only had to use it once, but it always gives me some peace of mind.
Hi Amit
Thanks for giving the credit to us.
Regards
Rohit / Abhishek
And you forgot the most important one - carry a printout with you..
Regarding Tip 2: I suggest using the font embedding feature of PowerPoint to ensure your fonts will display properly. That way you can still present the look and feel you want without having to resort to using just Arial and Times New Roman.
In PPT 2003, this “Embed TrueType fonts” option is in the “Save options…” dialog that is on the Tools menu in the “Save/Save As” dialogs.
about tip 3
an alternative way is to save the powerpoint as a pps slideshow file
so the file can be opened and showed even without powerpoint
File->save as->select pps in file type
Save your video in MPEG1!.
Since Windows PowerPoint only supports Windows Media (and some old formats) and Mac PowerPoint only supports Vanilla Quicktime ( and some old formats) - any video needs to be in an old format to maintain compatibility. MPEG1 is the best of the old formats.
If only MS would allow Quicktime to use its plugins in PowerPoint, this would not be a problem, but alas, they don’t want it to be easy to make a cross compatible presentation.
And also…
Unless you are doing some last minute editing, carry .PPS files instead of .PPT. That way, they will behave like executables, full screen, instead of opening PowerPoint in edition mode.
I find it soooo unprofessional when people keep betraying their lack of knowledge of these tools. Just like seeing (in 2007) HTML documents full of «font» tags.
PS: And if you only have the .PPS file and you need to do that last minute editing, just rename it to .PPT and it will open as needed.
Actually i am a victim of these.I was interrupted by the windows messenger.Thanks for the tip anyway.