Presenting on the iPad

One question we get a lot is how to present on the iPad. There are several options depending on your source material and needs, each with their own pros and cons. Let’s start with the basics.

If your presentation is in PowerPoint or Keynote, your best bet is to present in Keynote for the iPad. While billed as having the same capabilities as the Mac desktop version of the same name, in reality it’s a little more like “Keynote Light”. However, it displays both PowerPoint and Keynote files well and even allows for basic editing of your content on the fly. Just make sure to proof your presentation on your iPad before going live with it because the app doesn’t always display everything perfectly. Fonts, text size, animations, and some graphic effects like drop shadows might be altered, and while embedded sound files are supported, any linked multimedia will be lost (see below for multimedia solutions).

If you have Adobe Acrobat, another effective way to display your presentation is to save your work as a PDF. This will look the most like your original presentation, but you will lose any animations, multimedia, and the ability to edit the deck. Likewise, you can export your presentations as a series of jpegs. Note that this will render one image file for each slide, so you’ll need to make sure none of the images get lost or reordered when you present them from the iPad’s photo browser.

If your presentation contains multimedia or extensive animations, we recommend converting it to an iPad supported video format using third party conversion software. A quick search for “PowerPoint to video converter” online will reveal a number of options. This is the best way to preserve the multimedia and animation of your original. The downside is a loss of some interactivity. While you can play, pause, and scrub the video, all on-click triggers will be ignored. Acceptable video formats for the iPad are MP4, M4V, MOV, and H.264 with a resolution of 640×480 or less.

Lastly, because Apple chooses not to support Flash on its mobile hardware at this time, video conversion is a necessity if this is the native format of your presentation. Interactivity isn’t supported, but your movie file should be a faithful representation of your source animation. File format and resolution guidelines are the same as above. You can either save the video to your iPad when you sync or post it to YouTube and play it through the native YouTube app (assuming, of course, you have a live internet connection).

Regardless of what you’re trying to present, the iPad is an exciting delivery mechanism. Knowing its potential as well as its limitations will allow you to fully exploit its strengths and impress your viewers.