5 Simple Tips for Presentation Preparation

Pic­ture this scene.  You have to address a group of peo­ple in a pub­lic set­ting.  Per­haps your boss and your co-workers, or maybe a prospec­tive client or a pro­fes­sional orga­ni­za­tion.  In prepa­ra­tion for the event you work hard on your pre­sen­ta­tion.  You have a great story to tell.  You choose the per­fect images to get your point across.  You find the per­fect font to fit your mes­sage.  You save your Pow­er­Point pre­sen­ta­tion.  You are ready to show off your cre­ativ­ity only to find that you can not use your lap­top, the com­puter you are going to use does not have your font, the ver­sion of Pow­er­Point on the machine is from 2003, the machine will not load your images, and your work of art has been trans­formed into a steam­ing pile of dig­i­tal garbage.  Con­fi­dence rat­tled, you race around to sal­vage your pre­sen­ta­tion, give it your best shot, strug­gle to make sense of your pre­sen­ta­tion for the audi­ence, pledg­ing that this will never hap­pen again.

Sound famil­iar?  These things hap­pen to pre­sen­ters all the time.  With so many dif­fer­ent ver­sions of soft­ware and hard­ware, per­mis­sions and capa­bil­i­ties, ver­sions and restric­tions, there are a lot of things that can ruin a pre­sen­ta­tion.  It is always good to have a few tricks up your sleeve to avoid unnec­es­sary pre­sen­ta­tion dis­as­ters.  Here are a few of my favorite tips:

1. Save Your Pre­sen­ta­tion as a PDF File — This is a very easy way to avoid prob­lems.  By sav­ing your pre­sen­ta­tion as a .pdf file you avoid­ing using Pow­er­Point all together.  By doing so you elim­i­nate the worry of font com­pat­i­bil­ity, ver­sion­ing, chart ren­der­ing, and other com­mon issues.  This is espe­cially use­ful if you are pre­sent­ing using equip­ment other than your own in instances where you use unique fonts or more com­plex graph­i­cal images.  Just open the pre­sen­ta­tion in Adobe Acro­bat Reader, put it in full screen mode, and go.  To the audi­ence, there is no dif­fer­ence on the screen from Pow­er­Point. This trick is also great when you need to email your pre­sen­ta­tion to some­one else, as the .pdf ver­sion is usu­ally con­sid­er­ably smaller than it’s Pow­er­Point coun­ter­part.  The only draw­back of this method is that you can’t use the Pre­sen­ter Tools and Speaker Notes that are included in Pow­er­Point.  Ide­ally, this is a great “plan B” option for a presenter.
2. Mul­ti­ple Pow­er­Point For­mats — You can eas­ily save a pre­sen­ta­tion as a .pptx .ppts .pps and .ppt file — one of which should be able to be read by Pow­er­Point.  Check to make sure that charts and graphs cre­ated in newer ver­sions of Pow­er­Point were not man­gled in the con­ver­sion process.   Addi­tion­ally, check to make sure that fonts and other ele­ments were not modified.
3. Thumbs Up — In addi­tion to sav­ing copies of your pre­sen­ta­tion on your com­puter, save your pre­sen­ta­tion on a thumb drive or an exter­nal hard drive.  This is a sim­ple way to make sure that if you are unable to use your own lap­top for the pre­sen­ta­tion, you can still get access your pre­sen­ta­tion.  This is also help­ful if your pre­sen­ta­tion files got lost by the orga­nizer of the pre­sen­ta­tion, who asked you to email them in advance.
4. Email Your­self — Send mul­ti­ple ver­sions of your pre­sen­ta­tion to a web based email account like Gmail.  I have been to places where thumb dri­ves are out­lawed, and where I was not able to use my own com­puter either.  Hav­ing a web based back-up allows you to have easy access the files.  If you can get to the inter­net from the com­puter you are using for the pre­sen­ta­tion, you can sim­ply down­load the most appro­pri­ate ver­sion.  If you can not get access to the web, you can use a mobile device to for­ward the pre­sen­ta­tion to some­one who can access the files and help.  Addi­tion­ally, this makes it very easy to send the slides to any­one who requests them.
5. Share & Share Alike — Upload your pre­sen­ta­tion to SlideShare.com where you can either present directly from the site or down­load the pre­sen­ta­tion and present it.  Both are viable options for a pre­sen­ter to fall back upon.   Not only that, peo­ple all around the world can view, share, and com­ment on your pre­sen­ta­tion — spread­ing your mes­sage, build­ing your rep­u­ta­tion, and improv­ing your content.

You can’t pre­pare for every­thing, but hope­fully these sim­ple lit­tle tricks will help ensure the suc­cess of your next presentation.

What tips and tricks do you use to elim­i­nate pre­sen­ta­tion problems?