If you’ve read The Gold Mine over the months, you know that we believe that it is possible to use Powerpoint well.  Earlier this month, I used Powerpoint to enhance a talk I gave to a group of colleagues in my professional network.  Valuable lessons were learned—by me.  And now, I share them with you.

Get Ready

I mapped out the overall message, and the component sections, of my talk. Then, I got it ready on Powerpoint. That part was so much fun! Too much fun! What a monstrous time suck!

I’d start searching through istockphotos.com. Let’s find photos of typewriters. Oh, goodie, they have 3,026!  By image 425 (or 25), I’d find a perfectly acceptable photo of a typewriter. But…why not look at all the rest?!  Maybe there’s a better one!

Finally, I’d pick a photo. Hmmm… maybe I should crop it this way…. or this way. Or position it off center. Maybe this should be slide 10, not slide 12. But is this really the right photo? Let’s look at more!  Shiny bits here, shiny bits there.

Lesson learned. Follow the map. Follow the clock. I’d have saved getting ready time if I had used any ol’ photo of a typewriter (or whatever photo was needed per page), as a temporary placeholder until I had the pages drafted, based on my map. Next time, I’ll build the pages first, and spend less time on the spackle and paint.

Aim

The Boy Scouts are right. Be prepared. Three weeks before my talk, I asked about the slide projection capability in the room. I’d seen Powerpoint used there before; I knew it could be done. But how? I was told “Just plug this plug into your laptop.” Piece o’ cake.

I decided to (a) be happy it was so easy and (b) not trust the information.  Once I had my slides ready:

• I saved the file on my laptop.
• I saved the file onto a flash drive, in case my laptop blew up but someone had a spare.
• I printed the slide and notes onto paper, in case the spare blew up.

I got there (early), plugged that plug into my laptop and—nada. I hailed one of my tech-savvy colleagues, who said, “Oh, sure, I can turn the projector on for you.” That was new news; no one had mentioned an On switch before. In a jiff, he had my slides projecting. Excellent!  Except I could not get Presentation View configured, even though it had worked fine at home when I rehearsed. My choices were to show in Slide View—I would not be able to see my notes—or show in Presenter View and everyone could see my notes. Because I had rehearsed, I was able to use Slide View and deliver my talk without needing my notes.

Lessons learned: Have a Plan A. Have a Plan B. Have a Plan C.  Consider every reasonable contingency for which to prepare (I used Plan E), so you’ll be ready when the curve ball comes your way. When, not if.

Fire

My presentation was to be 10 minutes long and not a tick longer. When I sat here in my office, with my stopwatch, I could deliver it, with poise and bounce, in exactly 10 minutes. But I knew that talks change in front of an audience.

Time would fly because I would:

• Talk more quickly than I ordinarily do.
• Forget to say some things, even if I had notes in front of me.

Time would get eaten when the audience would:

• Laugh at the jokes. (I always enjoy mining the humor.)
• Participate. (I had built in some quizzes, and I was speaking to a competitive bunch.)
• Comment. (At some spots, people reacted out loud. The photo of me as a 2-year old got plenty of “awww’s!”)

Lessons Learned:  If allotted 10 minutes of time, don’t prepare a 10-minute speech. I got more laughs than I’d expected—I’m not complaining, but that added seconds which I had to make up for by dropping some adjectives later on. Nor had I anticipated so many spontaneous comments. None of it was heckling or overriding my talk, so I did allowed a second or two to let the comment “reach” everyone in the audience. That added flavor to the talk, but took up time. I finished in 9.5 minutes.

The whole shebang, start to finished, entertained me! I enjoyed getting it ready, getting it going, delivering the talk—and hearing the many enthusiastic compliments afterwards.