Slides are out.

Transparencies are out.

Boards are out.

Laptops are in.

If you’ve attended a presentation recently, chances are the presenter used a laptop computer to develop and show their presentation. These are called digital presentations.

What’s different about doing a digital presentation?

Last minute changes. You’ll be able to modify the presentation right up until seconds before you present the material. This is critical for those of you who are working around the clock to finish your presentations. From my experience, this is everyone.

Customization. You can easily customize your digital presentation for a specific audience. For example, you may have a comprehensive presentation that describes all your products, services and staff members. But different audiences may be interested in only subsets of your complete presentation. Customization is as easy as cutting and pasting within a digital presentation.

Multimedia Treats. In addition to standard bullet text slides, you can also include photographs (scanned and digital), computer artwork, digitized audio and digitized movies. Used correctly, these techniques can be both interesting and persuasive.

Portability. You won’t require bulky audio/visual equipment to show your digitized photos, audio and video samples. A laptop computer and a display projector are the only items you’ll need to carry.

Interactivity. Not everyone wants to sit through a slide show from start to finish. A digital presentation can be interactive, meaning the presenter can skip around and only show the "good stuff" or perhaps go back to review an earlier section of the show.

In other words, a digital presentation can help do the two things you should be striving for:

1. Get their attention
2. Keep their attention

FIRST: Ask the Questions

Before you begin any presentation, you should ask a series of questions to help you focus. It sounds like an obvious concept, but many people skip right over this part and jump into the content creation.

Resist the urge to plow ahead. Ask these questions first:

Who?

• Audience background?
• Number of people in the audience?
• Audience expectations? Friendly or hostile?
• Who is doing the presenting? You or someone else?

When?

• Date of event? How much time do you have to prepare?
• Can we begin now? Is the "content" ready?
• Time of day? Business meeting, luncheon, dinner?
• How much time do have to set up the equipment?

Where?

• Location of event?
• Type of room. Where are the windows, doors, chairs, tables, lectern?

Format?

• Duration?
• Lecture, interactive, panel discussion, question/answer? 

Seven Rules Of Compatibility

Let’s say you use a Macintosh computer for your graphic design workstation, but you need to produce a PowerPoint presentation for a Windows user. Can it be done? Here are six rules compatibility you need to know:

1. PowerPoint for Macintosh has been available in versions 1, 2, 3, 4 and 98. All are upwardly compatible, meaning a higher version number of the software can open documents saved in earlier version.
2. Windows versions of PowerPoint have been available in versions 2, 3, 4, 95 and 97. These are also upwardly compatible within the Windows PowerPoint family.
3. Macintosh and Windows documents created with equal version numbers are directly cross-platform compatible. For example, PowerPoint for Windows version 4 can open documents created in Macintosh version 4.
4. You can save your PowerPoint documents in as an earlier version. For example, Macintosh PowerPoint 98 users can "Save as…" a document in PowerPoint 4.0 format, allowing people with older software to use it.
5. There is no direct equivalent to the Office 95 for Windows version of PowerPoint.
6. The Office 97 version of PowerPoint for Windows shares the same document format as Office 98 for Macintosh.
7. When creating a presentation for use on the "other" platform (create on Mac, deploy on Windows) the choice of fonts is critical. If you pick a font that is not installed on the target computer, PowerPoint will substitute another font — and probably not the one you want. Keep this in mind if you want to have control over how your presentation will look! Pick a font that will be available on the target computer.

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