Preparing Your Presentation

Using Images

Using Media Clips

Using Animation

Fonts

Avoiding Common Presentation Pitfalls

Presentation Delivery Tips


Preparing Your Presentation

• Prepare your presentation in advance so that your ideas are logically organized and your points clear. Write a detailed outline of your presentation. Address the essential points and leave the details for publication.
• Presentations are most readable when using a dark background (blue, for example) and bright lettering (yellow or white.)
• Use the absolute minimum number of words in the title, subtitle, and captions. Remember that standard abbreviations are acceptable.
• Avoid using small fonts. In general, 28 point and larger fonts will be easy for everyone to read, while anything smaller than 20 points will likely be illegible from the back of the room. It is often helpful to step 8-10 feet back from your computer screen and make sure that your slides are readable.
• Use bold characters, not fancy serifs.
• Graphics must be well designed, simple, and readable by everyone in the audience. It is worthwhile to use professional preparation services, if possible.
• Consider breaking up a complex slide into a series of slides, to make it more intelligible.

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Using Images Within Your Presentation

• PowerPoint will display your presentation in slide show mode at 1920x1080 resolution. The PC has a native display of 96DPI (Dots Per Inch). You should consider these factors, when inserting images into your presentation. If your image file is scanned, or from a digital camera, it is likely to be much larger than the screen resolution. (1920x1080 96dpi) An image size larger than 1920x1080 will not translate into a sharper image, when displayed on screen. It will only increase the size of your PowerPoint file and slow down the playback of your presentation. Reduce the image size in an image-editing program (like Adobe Photoshop®) prior to inserting the image into your presentation.
• There are many different image file formats available. Generally the JPEG format provides high quality, small file size and portability to other machines.
• If the image file is the output of a mathematical program (such as MATLAB®) please make sure that you save the image as a JPEG and not as a Metafile. The latter file depends upon the software program being installed, to properly display the image.
• Once you have the images properly sized and saved, choose Insert Picture from file… to put the image onto the slide. Do not copy and paste the image, or drag and drop it into your presentation. Doing that might look fine on your machine, but it may not display properly when you transfer the presentation to another computer, particularly if you are a Mac user who will be presenting from a PC.

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Using Media Clips Within Your Presentation.

• Avoid long file names for media clips. There is a limit in PowerPoint on the total length of the path to your media files, and much of it gets used up in pointing to your presentation folder. Though the absolute limit varies based on the presenter’s last name and session room, movie and sound files with names longer than 20 characters should be renamed prior to inserting them in your presentation. The shorter the file names of your media clips, the better.
• PC Users: Using the .WMV file format is the best way to ensure compatibility within PowerPoint on another PC. While MPEG and AVI formats will generally work too, they use a variety of different codecs that may not be installed on the presentation machine.
• Mac Users: If you are going to be presenting from a PC and you can convert your videos to .WMV format, they should play properly within slides in PowerPoint. Most MPEG and some AVI codecs will also work on the PC.
• If you’ll be presenting from a Mac, .MOV files using the Sorenson 3 or MPEG-4 codecs are good choices for compatibility with other Macs.
• All Presenters Using Media Clips:Plan to visit the speaker ready room as early as possible, but at least 24 hours prior to your talk. With sufficient time our technicians can fix almost any video playback problem, but re-encoding videos can be a time consuming process. Although audio and video files are embedded into your presentation by default in recent versions of PowerPoint, you should still bring separate copies of the media files with you when you come to the speaker ready room, in case they need to be converted to another format in order to play properly on the presentation machine.
• If you have specific questions regarding codecs and your presentation, please contact us at projectionnet@projection.com

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Using Animation

• Animated builds, moves, highlights and transitions can help visually reinforce your message. However, these are often overused by presenters and can detract from the message you are trying to convey. Different versions of PowerPoint have different sets of animation features that are not always backwards compatible, it is best to use as little animation as possible to keep your audience focused on your content, and minimize problems in portability.

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Fonts

• The presentation systems will be loaded with Standard System Fonts. If your presentation contains any special fonts, you must provide a copy of the font, to be loaded on the presentation system. Please pay special attention to fonts, if you use scientific notation within your presentation, as this is often written using a non-standard font.
• PC users: to be safe, use a standard font like Arial or Times New Roman to create your presentation. For PC users with PowerPoint 2010 and newer, there is an option to embed your fonts within your presentation. Go to File/Options/Save Options and check the box for ‘Embed fonts in the file’. Choose the ‘Embed All Characters’ option in case you need to make changes onsite that require characters not already in your presentation.
• Mac users: many fonts with the same names are spaced differently on Macs and PCs. The Tahoma font is designed to be identical on both systems, so using it whenever possible will help avoid the need to adjust things once your presentation is moved to a PC.

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Avoiding Common Presentation Pitfalls

• Users of PowerPoint 2007/2008 and newer should save their presentations in their versions’ native .pptx format, not in the PowerPoint ’97-2003 format, as this will provide better overall compatibility with our systems.
• Unix Users must have HTML files or PDF files in Adobe Acrobat format.
• Embedded charts, graphs, and object-oriented graphic files are often difficult to work with. These file types usually are influenced by the version of the program used to create them, often making them translate strangely on a different computer system. It is recommended that charts or graphics be inserted into your presentation as a bitmap format graphic. (Examples of bitmap formats are: .gif, .jpg, .bmp, and .tiff) If you embed charts and object graphics in your presentation, it is advisable to have the bitmap format graphics available on your media.
• Acrobat Reader. You are welcome to bring your files in Acrobat’s PDF format; however, editing these files at the meeting will not be possible.
• HTML presentations. Make sure that your files are portable. Data will be copied from your media to the networks hard drive. If files are not portable, you could lose links between pages.
• Web Server. A Web Server is not on the network so please plan accordingly.
• Other Plug-Ins or Active X controls. These cannot be installed into the network. If your presentation takes advantage of a function not built into Internet Explorer, Chrome or Firefox, you may have difficulties onsite.
• If you use PowerPoint’s rehearse timings feature, pay close attention to the dialog box that appears after you finish rehearsing. It will offer to save the timings from your rehearsal, and if you inadvertently agree it will set them as automatic advances of your slides at the times you just rehearsed. Unless you want your slides to advance on their own at predetermined times, you’ll want to say no to this option. To check if there are any automatic timings currently associated with your slides, choose the slide sorter view of your presentation, they can be seen as numbers (00:10, for example,) below the bottom left corner of each slide.

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Presentation Delivery Tips

• Be considerate of the other speakers and the audience by staying within your allotted time. This is essential to ensure adequate time for questions and discussion and adherence to schedule.
• Please discuss the same material as reported in the abstract.
• Take the time to rehearse your presentation. Give your talk to one or more colleagues and ask them for suggestions for improvement. If your presentation runs longer than the allotted time, eliminate the least essential material and rehearse again.
• Use the public address system and be sure to speak slowly and clearly into the microphone. When using a microphone clipped to your lapel, it may be difficult for the audience to hear you if you turn your head away from the microphone.
• Face the audience, not the slides or graphics you are showing, and try to establish eye contact with members of your audience in various areas of the room.
• Do not read your presentation verbatim from your notes or slides.

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