How to skip around in the middle of a presentation

One of the advantages of the acetate slide era was that it was easy to call up the particular slide you wanted at a particular time. With PowerPoint a lot of speakers feel they need to click through all their slides to get to a particular slide. There is a better way.

1. Hit the slide sorter command on your presentation. You'll see the slides along with their corresponding number (the numbers are a little hard to see on the figure below, but they are just below the lower left corner of each slide).

2. Take a screen shot of your slides (cmd-shift-4)

3. Print out the screen shot and take the printout to your talk

4. At any point in the presentation mode, you can enter the number of the slide on the screen shot, hit return and you will get right to the slide

Some technical "PowerPoint" tips

While lack of PowerPoint skills is hardly the major problem, here's a few rules to go by:

• Don't compare objects with red and green. Lots of people have red-green color blindness.

• Use sharp contrasts. Colors on the projection screen may look quite different than on your computer monitor.

• Use a simple font that's easy to read, Arial bold is a good example. No fancy script type fonts

• No logos or templates. A blank white sheet with black font is normally perfect. In a very large auditorium it can help to reverse things and have a very light font against a dark slide.

• Write big. 24 Arial bold for text, 36 Arial bold for titles. 18 and 32 is passable. If for some reason (???) you need to put something up with a smaller font, point to that part of the slide and tell the audience they don't need to read it.

• Try not to go to the edge of the slide, you never know if the projection will show the complete slide.

A car is not an automobile (in a presentation)

One sure-fire way to lose the audience is to switch terminology in the middle of a presentation. You need to stick to one name for anything you are trying to represent. The USA is not the United States of America in a presentation unless you tell the audience it is.

You may want to invoke abbreviations after you introduce a concept. For example, suppose you want to use the term EMR for an Electronic Medical Record. The first time the concept appears on a slide it should look like the following: Electronic Medical Record (EMR). Now point to the words with your pointer and tell the audience that you will now be referring to Electronic Medical Records as EMRs. Anytime you switch nomenclature (which you should avoid as much as possible) tell the audience that you are doing that.

The same holds true for logos or any sort of visuals symbolizing a concept. Keep your terms and visuals as consistent as possible.