Presenting

Presenting combines speaking with a multimedia presentation.

Presentation Tips

• All the rules of speaking apply, plus the added rules of presenting with visuals
• relax... most folks talk too fast.   
• imagine you are sitting in the front row watching yourself...
• explain acronyms the first time you use them.
• don't rattle your keys or change or fidget.
• make eye contact with folks in the audience, throughout the room, going from side to side... don't focus on your notes or keyboard.
• don't read your keynote to the audience... just put the graphics and "big picture" up there, and keep your talk synched to the keynote or blank the keynote. 
• don't have topic X showing while talking about Y.
  or don't use keynote... draw the pictures as you go, or draw them in the air so you can point to them later.
• Bring surge protectors and extension cords if you’ve got ‘em. Keep them in your car unless we need them, but good to have extras.
• Rehearse your talks and leave room for questions.
• Don’t plan on having wi-fi for your talk. You probably will, but make screenshot slides and such just in case.

Presentation Software

Keynote

Keynote is the ACTSPEC -preferred software for building presentations.

A Keynote presentation was the star of Al Gore's documentary film An Inconvenient Truth.

PowerPoint & Impress

Microsoft PowerPoint is the industry standard of presentation software. OpenOffice Impress is a free software alternative that is compatible with PowerPoint. PowerPoint is available for Mac and Windows. OpenOffice is available for Windows and Linux with a functional but non-Aqua Mac version.

Some difficulties arise when moving PowerPoint files between Mac and Windows. Pictures and other multimedia that are embedded can become unreadable on the other platform. For this reason, it is highly recommended that all pictures used in PowerPoint be saved in cross-platform formats like JPG before embedding into PowerPoint. You can prevent this by exporting Mac pictures into JPG by using Preview's File Menu/Save As...