| resources |
|
|
Free Presentation Tips
Newsletter |
| Enter Your Email Address: |
|
|
|
|
Keeping No-Brainers at Bay |
|
|
|
When you’re preparing a presentation, you pull together your content, drop in some graphics or charts, jot down some speaker’s notes, review the slides a few times, and you should be good to go. . .right?
Wrong! “No-brainer” errors are stealthy and crafty, hiding deep within the infrastructure of your presentation and waiting to spring out, embarrass you, and distract your audience at a moment’s notice. To avoid being caught with your pants down at your next presentation, refer to this handy checklist before you step up to the podium: | |
|
- Don’t Miss the Forest for the Trees – Always, always run a spelling and grammar check, and then make sure you do a thorough proofread to catch any bits and pieces that your computer may have missed. If you were a math geek and not an English whiz at school, hand your presentation over to a colleague for a final sanity check before going live.
- Don’t Get Trapped by Someone Else’s Great Ideas - Often when we build presentations, we cobble together slides from a number of other sources. Leveraging another person’s slides and not proofing or customizing them, however, can be a recipe for disaster. Don’t get caught off-guard by strange animation or audio embedded into slides. Discovering them while you’re in mid-presentation is not a pleasant surprise!
- Not Everyone Has a Roadie - If you aren’t working with a support staff, make sure you can get into the room as early as possible to iron out any hardware issues. There’s nothing more frustrating for you or your audience than having to sit and wait while a technician fiddles with wiring to try and figure out why your presentation won’t project onto the screen.
- Get Rid of the Hiccups - Your laptop’s technical bells and whistles are part of your everyday life by now, but they shouldn’t play a role in your presentation. Before you take the stage, make sure you disable your screen savers, shut down your email client, and make sure you are logged out of instant messaging.
While this simple checklist may seem full of obvious, easy-to-catch mistakes, the savvy presenter always has a sharp eye out for them. By remaining on top of seemingly obvious issues and addressing them, you can keep your audience focused on your presentation, not your mistakes.
|
|
|
|
