Presentation tips

In the old days it was considered useful to be able to do things like make fire and slay mammoths. These skills are in less demand these days. But an ability to present well in front of an audience is something that is always going to come in handy. Here are my tips:

• Decide what you want your presentation to achieve:

  • Leave them knowing something

  • Get them to do something

  • Change the way that they think about something

• Try to pull out five or so really important things that you want the audience to take away. Don't try and do too many. Say what they are at the start, do each one and then say what they were at the end.

• Make acting on the outcome of the presentation as easy as possible.

• Never apologise at the start. It will only lower expectations.

• Don't expect to enjoy giving your first presentation, but don't be surprised if you get a taste for it.

• Do not try too hard to judge how your presentation went. What you think was a bad presentation might well go down a storm with the audience. And, unfortunately, vice-versa.

• If you think you're having more fun than the audience, stop at once.

• Don't expect things that are important to you to be important to your audience as well.

• Expect to have to sell your subject, so try to put it in a context that works for your audience.

• Don't think that you have to show off your knowledge to impress the audience. They are going to be more engaged if they can see how what you're telling them will improve their lives.

• The ultimate sin for a presenter is to overrun. Underrunning is fine. I find it easier to pad out a bit with things that I'd like to say than chop stuff out on the fly to hit the end time. Although I've done both.

• Always take questions. Make it clear when/how this is will happen.

• If a question only seems relevant to the questioner, take it offline. Some questioners like to ask things to show that they know more than you. Allow them to do this (you look a lot bigger that way). Don't start trading points. If the answer is a matter of opinion, take it offline.

• Never argue with the audience, and never set the audience up against a questioner.

• Don't be afraid to be wrong in front of the audience.

• The audience will be more inclined to follow you if you are amusing/interesting but they will be very inclined to follow you if they think what you are saying is useful/valuable to them. So make sure you tell them why the content is important. And use their words.

• Make sure you have a backup plan in case everything breaks. Test the backup.

• Don't write down everything you are planning to say but do have something that you can look at if you need inspiration. Me, I love a good slide deck, but I may be out of fashion. Bullet points are a good compromise.

• A rehearsal won't do any harm, particularly in respect of getting the timing right.

• Having something fun you can look forward to (a trip to the bar, etc etc) that you will definitely be doing after the presentation, whether it goes well or badly.

Red Nose Design Ideas from PowerPoint

I’m working on the slides for the Red Nose Day lecture in rhyme. Sponsor me. Then come back and read the rest of this post.

Ah, there you are. Thanks very much. I’m using the latest version of PowerPoint. It has this “Design Ideas” feature that takes your slide, does something “AI” with it and then suggest a layout. The original design is below, and is perhaps a bit boring.

OK, forget perhaps. It is a bit boring. PowerPoint Design Ideas suggest this instead:

This is a lot less boring. I love the way that it has found suitable icons for all the points and then laid it out for me. I’m not sure that I’ll use it in this case, but it has suggested lots of other options too which I can incorporate into the presentation. It also found a wonderful piece of animated art for the start of the presentation. Which you’ll have to come along on Friday the 18th of March to see.

Up until recently I thought that a tool like PowerPoint had probably got about as useful as it could get. It’s nice to see that there are still ways it can be improved.

Communication Matters

I’ve long been convinced that communication skills are crucial for engineers. Actually, I think they are crucial for everyone, but their importance needs to be sold to us techies. We tend to focus on solving the problem rather than telling people what we have done and why it is a good idea. In my experience an engineer can make themselves around 10 times more useful simply by learning how to communicate properly.

And the critical message for an engineer is that presenting is a skill that can be learned. I used to tell students that they should approach being able to present well in the same way that they would learn a new programming language or application programmer interface (API). In other words, find out how to do it and then do it.

It’s lovely to see that other people take this seriously too. Clive Maxfield and Lucy Rogers have some great things to say about the importance of presentation and how to do it. Both are splendid folks who are well worth following.

Making videos with OBS and Camtasia

After many years of trying, I think I’ve finally found a decent workflow for making videos. I’ve always loved Camtasia for making screencasts but I really like the flexibility of OBS for getting video onto my computer. So now I use both. The only thing I needed to do for it all to work was to go into File>Settings in OBS and change the video recording format to mp4:

Once I made that change I could import my recording files into Camtasia. It asks me if I want to use 60Hz video for the project (oh yes I do) and then lets me get on with formatting the video, adding captions, sorting out the audio and finally uploading it straight to YouTube. OBS is free and Camtasia has a really generous free trial period. If you are thinking about making some videos these two tools are a great way to get started.

Full disclosure: Tecksmith were kind enough to give me a copy of Camtasia to play with as part of my Microsoft MVP award. But I’d been using Camtasia and liking it in my day job for a good while before I got the freebie.

Teams Online Presentation Tips

I learned a couple of neat things getting the presentation to DDD yesterday. I’m putting them here so I won’t forget for next time, but you might find them useful too.

How to sort out sound

If you want to play computer audio during your presentation (I did) you can click the “Include Computer Sound” option you’ll find at the top left of your presentation window. Now when you play videos and use programs that produce audio output the viewers can hear you.

If the presentation sound output from your computer sounds a bit quiet, open up the Control Panel, select Sound and then open the Communications tab you can see above. Windows reduces the level of audio outputs from your PC during a call so that messages from other programs don’t intrude too much. You want the programs to intrude, so select the option Do nothing.

Now people can hear all of your PC sounds at full volume, including noises that you might not want during your presentation. But you can tame these by right clicking the speaker icon in your task bar and selecting Open Volume Mixer from the context menu. There you can control the volume level from all the applications on your machine. You can boost the ones you want to hear and quieten the ones you don’t.

How to solve camera conundrums

I like to use a second usb camera on my PC to give close up views of items during a presentation. I just use the Windows camera application for this. If I’m sharing my desktop the viewers can see the camera preview window on my desktop and it all works OK. However, if I’m using Teams it doesn’t work. As soon as I open the video source in a Teams call (so that folks can see me speaking) none of the other camera devices can be picked up by applications on my PC. The only way round this is to turn off video sharing in Teams while I use the second camera and then turn it back on again afterwards. Or at least, that is what I did.