3 Things to Help That Presentation Go Better

I recently gave two presentations at Codestock. One on Kanban that I’ve given a number of times and is well rehearsed, and another on IronRuby that I’d never presented before. I had given a similar talk, but a good bit of this one was new. Since I hadn’t practiced the IronRuby talk too many times, it didn’t go as well as I’d had hoped.

There’s the first sign I was going to have trouble, I hoped it would go well. The Kanban talk I knew would go well, not so much with the IronRuby talk. I had some time issues in preparing, had a number of other events I was was participating in, but none of that mattered to those people in the room with me in Knoxville while I did an under prepared presentation.

Here are three things you can do to save yourself the same fate I had in Knoxville.

1. Un-busy those slides!

Yeah, drop the bullet points, the animations, the cool stuff that PowerPoint or Keynote will let you do and just keep it simple. I mean, who’s telling this story? You or some software program that just needs you there to hit the “Next” button?

I was recently at a national/international level conference and a fairly well known speaker was giving a talk, but this person’s slides had all kinds of images and animations and bullet points. They had crammed so much info on each slide that a number of their headings were lost in the curtaining surrounding the screen. As an audience member I had a poor user experience, and I can’t recall the topic of the talk because I was so distracted by the horror that was on display in their slide deck.

Simplify. One image per slide is a technique I use often. Use that image to support what you’re talking about rather than BE what you’re talking about. Keep the animations low, one or two per slide is plenty. You don’t want to distract your audience, you want them listening to you.

The last point on un-busying your slides, I’m sure a few of you are thinking, “But when I upload my slide deck, nobody will know what the main points of the talk were.” That’s fine, put the supporting points to the slide in the speaker notes, then a downloader will have a good idea what you were talking about…in the presentation they should have attended. (Because you were that awesome!)

2. Practice, practice, practice!!

Give your presentation to the wall of your office a few times. Set up a few of your kid’s (or your own) stuffed animals and regale them with the wonders of TSQL. Give it to some colleagues in an informal lunch and learn. But, practice it a number of times. You want to be comfortable with the flow of the presentation and the points you want to make on each slide.

You can add speaker notes to help you through, and jog your brain on some points you’d like to make, but you want to practice enough that you’re comfortable to give a good talk without those notes. Because…

Let’s say – hypothetically – you own a MacBook Pro and an iPhone and you’re going to use the wonders of the Apple Corporation to help you give a presentation. You’re going to use the phone as your presentation remote and it’ll show you those bullet point, memory joggers mentioned above. And because it’s all Apple, all the time…IT’LL JUST WORK! But – again, hypothetically – something is wrong with the wireless network and for some reason the phone doesn’t want to connect to an ad hoc network on your laptop. What then? What of those memory joggers? The notes? Well, you will have practiced enough that this will barely even slow you down.

3. Practice those code samples

Yes, more practice. But with good reason.

Live coding can make or break you…it usually breaks me. I’ve bored enough people to tears with my live coding, that I rarely do it. I have some colleagues that are awesome at live coding demos. Somehow they’ve mastered the art of saying one thing and typing another. I don’t have that gift…just like I don’t have the gift of being able to hit a fastball, the gift 4.3 speed, or the gift a 103 MPH slap shot. But, I digress.

Practice those coding samples. I mean, as developers were in this to code anyway, just do the same code over and over so you can give the presentation without a hitch. I read a great line the other day, and though it applied to development in general, it definitely fits here: Novices will practice until they get it right, experts will practice until they never get it wrong. When it comes time to do a code sample in front of 40 developers, you’re going to want to be an expert.

That’s all there is to it

So, in review…

1. Keep it simple
2. Practice the presentation
3. Practice the code samples
4. And, um, have fun!

Yes, it’s a bit of work to put on a presentation. But when it comes time to deliver that presentation, the people watching you are giving up part of their day to spend with you. Respect those people and that hour of time of theirs that they’re giving to you.

IronRuby at CONDG

Off the top, apologies for the rather dark color scheme. The slides I think I can change the contrast on a little and they’ll be fine, but I know better than to use a dark color scheme for my ide and/or text editor. I guess the editing of the config file in Rails was just all black, sorry about that. (On the config side, you didn’t miss much, though.)

HOWEVER! :)

I just uploaded a PDF of the slides and you can look at them in whatever color scheme really makes them pop! You can get it all here: http://github.com/timwingfield/TestingSeaPound/tree/CONDG

Not a total cop out, please take a look at the code sample if you want to see the complete test classes from the examples - both the nUnit and RSpec ones. The rails app uploaded is the same one I created in the presentation, complete with the poorly named controller.

Again, sorry for the dark background in places, but thanks for coming out to watch.

(And big thanks to Kruger for making me remember how much I miss AutoHotKey after moving to the Mac. Windows devs, download AutoHotKey as soon as you read this.)

A Weekend With pptPlex

Some time last fall I believe, Jeff introduced me to pptPlex from Microsoft Office Labs. It does some pretty neat tricks with your slide deck. To me it appeared to be Deep Zoom for Power Point. (And let's be honest, anything to spice up Power Point is a good thing.)

So, I've got a new presentation to put together, and thought now would be a good time to give pptPlex a try. I wasn't disappointed, it does make moving through your presentation more fun. To get it to work there are a couple special slide types it uses, and a different way to launch the deck, and that's about it.

The first special slide is the section divider slide. It has a title and some grayed out text on it. You drag it into the deck at the point you want a section to start, add the title, and done. That section will exist until pptPlex finds another section divider slide. This groups your slides by however you'd like, and applies the title from the section divider slide to that group.

The second special slide type is a canvas slide. This slide ends up being the canvas for the whole presentation. There are a few pre-made ones you can use, and also two custom options. Basically, the layout you choose determines how your slide groups are arranged on the canvas. I ended up using the advanced custom option, which wasn't too hard to lay out. Lots of typical dragging and dropping to get the layout like you want it. Took maybe 10 minutes to get my six sections all set up like I want.

Both the section and canvas slides appear on the new pptPlex portion of the ribbon. Also on that menu are the new options for launch that will start your presentation up in pptPlex mode rather than in traditional Power Point mode. The first of "From Overview" is the one that will start your presentation from the canvas, and is the one I think most people are going to use.

Now for the downsides I ran into...

First issue I came up with was that it didn't work with my presenter mouse. I've got the Microsoft Wireless Notebook Presenter Mouse 8000, and no dice with it doing anything in presenter mode. A little searching on the web turns up that pptPlex doesn't yet support that mouse. HOWEVER! It will support use with a Wii remote and an xbox controller. +1 to each for cool factor, but I'm trying to be practical here and still give a presentation.

My solution to this ended up being mapping the two side buttons on my mouse to the left and right keys on the keyboard. It's not the ideal solution, but it will cover 90% of what I'll need to handle during a presentation. There will be a couple of gotchas with this, but it should get the job done.

The second issue I came across was that once you've published your slides to the pptPlex output, you lose all your animations. I don't use animations a lot, but a couple places they would have come in very handy for effect. However, the pptPlex FAQ lays out that they just didn't have time to get that in for this release. (Yo, MS, add one more guy to the team and task him with mouse integration and animation!)

Overall, I'm digging the product. I think it'll help with a lot of my presentations, and I'll probably refactor any of my old ones to use it. The cool factor it brings makes the above two hurdles tolerable.

Besides, a sensor bar and a bluetooth card form my laptop will have me running a Wii controller in no time!