Office 2008 for Macintosh: The Missing Manual

Delivering the Presentation

If you’re responsible for the whole event, it falls on to you to deal with a handful of tasks that seemingly have nothing to do with your presentation. Factors like lighting and furniture can have a huge impact on your audience’s experience. Unfortunately, if you’re late or equipment fails, your audience may be less receptive to your message.

Try to take care of the following ahead of time so you can solve any problems before the audience arrives.

• Know how to unlock the doors, adjust the lights, and control the temperature. If you have to dim the lights in order to see the screen, make sure there’s a light projecting on you whenever you’re speaking so your audience can see you.

• If you have control over the way the room is set up, place the podium at center stage and your screen off to the side. The slides are for speaker support—what you’re saying is the main attraction.

• Set up and test the equipment, or coordinate with your tech support people who’ll be running the lights and the public address system.

• If your audio person needs to manage inputs—say, from your laptop’s sound output and your microphone—print a slide list for her (see Printing Your Slides) with all the audio cues clearly indicated. For example, she might need to fade out the “walk-in” music and turn on your microphone input; or she may need to turn up the sound from your computer’s audio during a part of the presentation while turning off your mic.

• Set up tables or set out information packets ...