Editor's Note: Claudyne offers Point, Click & Wow! free when you purchase her CD: Slides That Win showing over 200 before and after PowerPoint slide examples (put in promotional code: pmaster). You can copy and use these designs. Find out more at wilderpresentations.com.
You can have the best intentions, truly know your presentation's objective, and study your audience's needs. But to succeed you must know your technology, at least enough to get by. You want to look and act like you know what you are doing. That can be difficult when you first start to do laptop presentations. This chapter gives you guidelines to use with the technology portion of your presentation. You will also read stories from over one hundred people who shared with us their technology successes and failures.
To begin with, try not to use a software program you are unfamiliar with. You may be in front of your audience and know that the program is not working, but not know what to do to fix the problem. It may be that someone else produced the presentation or that you have minimal experience with this software program. It's hard for people to take you and your topic seriously if you can't even run the software package. Take a class. See a video. Read a book. Practice on your own. If you don't have time to learn it, then have someone with you who does know the program.
The major theme that runs through this chapter is don't use unfamiliar equipment. If you are trying to sell people a product and you have problems operating the equipment, they may ask themselves, "How good can she be? How good can this company's customer service be if they send out people who can't run some simple equipment?" These are some of the thoughts that run through your viewers' minds. That isn't the kind of impression you want to make.
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Make someone teach you how to run the equipment. Find out about some of the trouble spots that can occur with the equipment and know what to do. Find someone who has been using the equipment for a while and ask what has gone wrong. You owe it to yourself and to your audience to be able to make it work.
The technological aspects of electronic presentations need not be intimidating. All the do's and don'ts for designing, organizing, and delivering effective overhead or 35 mm slide presentations apply equally to computer slide shows. In this section we will give you guidelines to follow so you can deliver an electronic presentation that people want to sit through.
What's Different About Electronic Presentations
Laptop presentations have many advantages. When the presenter is using a remote mouse, he or she is free to walk around, get closer to the audience, and connect with them. The presentation doesn't have to be static and linear. When links to other presentations are used, the audience's interests and questions can drive the amount and type of information presented. The presenter can access other files with information that someone in the audience may request.
A computer-driven presentation is different from a static overhead or slide presentation in only four ways:
1. You need a computer. This is changing though. You are now able to give a presentation with just an LCD projector.
2. You need to learn how to use the "movement" features appropriately. Suitably placed transitions between slides, builds, and moving charts can help make your point and enhance your theme. Computer presentations can also include video clips and 3D animations. A dynamic computer presentation can significantly boost the retention level of the audience. A word of caution: Many novice computer presenters are tempted to include all types of transitions, builds, and other special effects just as soon as they learn them. The result is predictable. The audience watches a poorly choreographed animated presentation that detracts from its core messages. The audience leaves confused about the objective. Or they may have focused on the new graphic technology but will have missed the messages.
If you put in animations for text or images, then use them to tell your story. One person told us: "I've seen a lot of presentations where the presenter has bullet points that wipe in one at a time, but they don't effectively use them. At the beginning of the slide they bring in all the bullet points before they start speaking about any of the points. This is very boring to watch when it happens slide after slide."
3. You need to do more equipment planning. This is an issue for audiences bigger than about three people. You have to plan for the equipment you will use. For a three-person audience, use your laptop screen. For larger audiences, the equipment options are greater and depend on the size of the audience, the importance of the presentation, and the budget.
4. You need to know how to use the equipment. Slide projectors and overheads are easy to operate. There isn't that much that can go wrong. That's not true with a computer-generated presentation. When problems occur, you need to have some idea of how to troubleshoot them. If you don't, you can end up feeling and looking incompetent and ill-prepared in front of an audience.
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