Over the last couple of weeks I’ve been writing a presentation that I have to give as part of my ILM5 qualification. I give presentations fairly regularly (in fact I’ve given two since I started writing this one), but this one is different in that I’m being assessed on every aspect of it, and the assessment criteria is fairly specific.
As part of this process I attended a one day workshop covering all the key aspects of presentation skills, and also giving us the opportunity to practice standing up and talking in front of other people who then provided feedback. I found this useful, and none of the feedback I received was a surprise. I think the only thing I could look to change related to delivery of presentations is the amount I move while I’m presenting, but I suspect I’m not going to be able to move less without feeling really self conscious and detracting from the quality of the presentation – I’m certainly willing to give it a try though.
We didn’t have to create slides as part of the training, but the other piece of feedback I generally get is around my slides, and specifically how they don’t contain a great deal of text and therefore often require further information to make sense to anyone who wasn’t actually at the presentation. I’ve not changed the style of my slides as result of this, but I have worked on ensuring they flow in a sensible chronological order, and I’ve also prepared a longer slide set that intersperses the slides I’ll be showing with slides containing what I’ll actually be saying. Hopefully this version of the presentation will be useful as a handout, and will add context to the slides I’ll be showing (which are largely diagrams, graphs and charts). I’m a big believer that slides should enhance a talk rather than acting as a script, and I’d much rather the audience were listening to what I say rather than reading it off a screen.
Over the years I’ve experimented with a few different ways of creating slides, although in recent years I’ve either presented from a PDF file or created them straight in Keynote (for more complex presentations). This time I ended up doing a bit of both, as I wanted to create the slides/notes as markdown files, but also wanted to take advantage of Keynote’s presentation mode. I created my slides as a markdown file, and converted them to a PDF using Pandoc and Beamer (the process is detailed here), and then I used a tool called PDF to Keynote to convert them. I prefer working in markdown because it allows me to convert the same file to a Word document, PDF, ebook and presentation, but it means I have to go through as couple of extra layers of processing to be able to present from Powerpoint. I’ve made sure I can do that this time, although it’s not usually something I’ll bother with, especially if I’m the only person presenting.
My plan is to present from my laptop in Keynote and to use my phone as a remote (or just to use the trackpad of the laptop as it’s a fairly small room). Mitigations for technical difficulties include PDF, Keynote and Powerpoint versions on a USB device and in Dropbox, a second laptop in my bag, and adaptors to allow me to connect either my phone or iPad to the projector and present from that (I had to do that once when my laptop decided to reboot just as I was about to present). I’ll also have the source markdown with me so I have the ability to create slides on the fly should I need to. A lot of this may be overkill, but I’d rather be prepared.