How To Run A Good Presentation
Topics: work presenting
There are all sorts of resources about creating a good slide deck, and about being a good public speaker – but there seems to be a gap when it comes to the actual mechanics of delivering a presentation. Since I regularly see even experienced presenters get some of this stuff wrong, I thought I’d write up some tips from my own experience.
I Can’t See My Audience
The first question is, are you presenting to a local audience, or is your audience somewhere else? This seriously changes things, and in ways that you might not have considered. For a start, any sort of rich animation in your slides is probably bad for a remote presentation, as it is liable to be jerky or even to fail entirely.
You should definitely connect to a remote meeting a few minutes ahead of time, even if you have already installed the particular client software required, as there can still be weird issues due to some combination of the version of the plugin itself, your web browser, or their server-side software. If the meeting requires some software you have not used before, give yourself at least fifteen minutes to take care of downloading, installing, and setting that up to your satisfaction.
Even when people turn on their webcam (and assuming you can see something useful through it, as opposed to some ceiling tiles), once you start presenting you probably won’t be able to see them any more, so remember to stop every few minutes to check that everyone is still with you, that they can see whatever you are currently presenting, and whether they have any questions. This is good advice in general, but it’s easier to remember when the audience is in the room with you. When you’re just talking away to yourself, it can be hard to remember that there are other people listening in – or trying to.
Fancy “virtual meeting room” setups like Cisco’s TelePresence are all very well – as long as all participants have access to the same setup. Most times that I have used such systems, a few participants were connecting in from desktop devices, from their computers, or even from phones, which of course gave them far less rich functionality. Don’t assume that everyone is getting the full “sitting right across the table from each other” experience!
My Audience Can’t See Me
In one way, presenting remotely without a webcam trained on you can be very freeing. I pace a lot; I do laps of the room while talking into a wireless headset. I think this helps me keep up the energy and momentum of a live presentation, which otherwise can be hard to maintain – both when I’m presenting and when I’m in the audience.
One complication is the lack of presenter mode. I’m on the record as a big fan of presenter mode, and I rely on this feature heavily during live presentations, both for speaker notes on the current slide and to remind myself about the next slide. Depending on the situation, I may also use the presenter view to jump around in my deck, presenting slides in a different order than the one they were saved in. Remote presentation software won’t let you do this, or at least, not easily. You can hack it if you have two monitors available, by setting the “display screen” to be the one shared with the remote audience, and setting the other one to be the “presenter screen”, but this is a bit fiddly to set up, and is very dependent on the precise meeting software being used.
This is particularly difficult when you’re trying to run a demo as well, because that generally means mirroring your screen so the remote audience sees the same thing as you do. This is basically impossible to manage smoothly in combination with presenter view, so don’t even try.
Be In The Room
If you are in the room with your audience, there’s a different set of advice. First of all, do use presenter mode, so that you can control the slides properly. Once you switch over to a demo, though, mirror your screen so that you are not craning your neck to look over your own shoulder like a demented owl while trying to drive a mouse that is backwards from your perspective. Make it so you can operate your computer normally, and just mirror the display. Practice switching between these modes beforehand. A tool that can really help here is the free DisplayMenu utility. This lives in your menu bar and lets you toggle mirroring and set the resolution of all connected displays independently.
Before you even get to selecting resolutions, you need to have the right adapters – and yes, you still need to carry dongles for both VGA and HDMI, although in the last year or so the proportions have finally flipped, and I do sometimes see Mini DisplayPort too. I have yet to see even the best-equipped conference rooms offer USB-C cables, but I am seeing more and more uptake of wireless display systems, usually either an AppleTV, or Barco ClickShare. The latter is a bit fiddly to set up the first time, so if you’re on your own without someone to run interference for five minutes, try to get a video cable instead. Once it’s installed, though, it’s seamless – and makes it very easy to switch devices, so that you can do things like use an iPad as a virtual whiteboard.
Especially during the Q&A, it is easy to get deeply enough into conversation that you don’t touch your trackpad or keyboard for a few minutes, and your machine goes to sleep. Now your humorous screensaver is on the big screen, and everyone is distracted – and even more so while you flail at the keyboard to enter your password in a hurry. To avoid this happening, there’s another wonderful free utility, called Caffeine. This puts a little coffee cup icon in your menu bar: when the cup is full, your Mac’s sleep settings are overridden and it will stay awake until the lid is closed or you toggle the cup to empty. [UPDATE: Caffeine has been superseded by Amphetamine; see here for details]
Whether the audience is local or remote, Do Not Disturb mode is your friend, especially when mirroring your screen. Modern presentation software is generally clever enough to set your system to not display on-screen alerts while you are showing slides (unless you are one of those monsters who share their decks in “slide sorter” view, in which case you deserve everything you get), but that won’t save you once you start running a demo in your web browser. Some remote meeting software lets you share a specific application rather than your whole screen, but all that means is that instead of the remote audience seeing the specific text of your on-screen alerts, they see ugly great redacted rectangles interfering with the display. Either way, it does not look great.
I hope these tips have been useful. Good luck with your presentations!
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