{"id":817,"date":"2011-01-02T15:25:39","date_gmt":"2011-01-02T14:25:39","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.elementally.co.uk\/presentation-skills-blog\/?p=817"},"modified":"2011-01-02T15:25:39","modified_gmt":"2011-01-02T14:25:39","slug":"presenting-on-the-road","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.awareplus.co.uk\/presentation-skills-blog\/presenting-on-the-road\/","title":{"rendered":"Presenting on the road"},"content":{"rendered":"

It’s very rare that we have the luxury of being able to control everything about our equipment when we’re presenting. \u00c2\u00a0My experience is that only about half the time are my clients presenting on ‘home turf’ – the other half of the time they’re in client’s offices or some shared conference room or (horror!) hotel room.<\/p>\n

There are problems-a-legion with working in strange venues and any professional will tell you two things. Firstly you should get there as early as you possibly can to make sure nothing can go wrong and secondly that no matter how early you get there, something will<\/strong> go wrong. \u00c2\u00a0Let me give you an example from a recent event I attended at the conference centre at St James’ Park (for those of you who don’t live in the UK, St James is the home stadium of Newcastle United, a football (soccer) team).<\/p>\n

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The room layout wasn’t helpful, and it wasn’t possible for everyone to see the screen. No doubt the fitters thought they were being very helpful when they then put a set of large TV screens onto pillars – because\u00c2\u00a0it did at least mean people could see what was on the screen, even if they couldn’t see the presenter!<\/p>\n

But take a quick look at the problems that resulted in the colour balances of the two types of screen are very (very!) different. \u00c2\u00a0(Forgive, please, the shoddy photography – I had to grab quick shots on my iPhone when I could)…<\/p>\n

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<\/a>On this occasion it didn’t make too much difficulty for the presenter because the slides were (boring) text – but imagine if the presenter had been trying to use (shock horror!) pictures in his presentation!<\/p>\n

My solution is to take our own projector(s) with us when we’re not familiar with the venue and its equipment (if that’s possible). That means that we can be as sure as possible that things will work out for us. \u00c2\u00a0Not everyone’s got the luxury of having their own projector, I know, but they’re reasonably cheap these days so if the presentation is important, or you’re going to make a few presentations it’s probably worth the investment.<\/p>\n

On the other hand, if you can’t use your own equipment, there’s a\u00c2\u00a0VERY<\/strong> simple piece of advice that should help – and which, I suspect will be obvious when you think about it! \u00c2\u00a0:)<\/p>\n

Don’t rely on subtle colour in your slides<\/strong> – by all means use colour but make sure that the images work pretty much, no matter how the projector damages them. \u00c2\u00a0The way to check is to play around with the colour-balances on your computer before you bung them into your slides. \u00c2\u00a0Pretty much any graphics software will allow you to do that easily enough and it won’t take you more than a couple of minutes. \u00c2\u00a0(Actually it can take you a lot longer if you start to get carried away, doing things for fun, to see what people look like with green faces and so on, but you know what I mean! \u00c2\u00a0:D \u00c2\u00a0)<\/p>\n

As a rule of thumb – no more – if you slides work in shades of grey, you should be fine to use them in colour no matter how bad the projector!<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

It’s very rare that we have the luxury of being able to control everything about our equipment when we’re presenting. \u00c2\u00a0My experience is that only about half the time are my clients presenting on ‘home […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[8,9,12],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-817","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-powerpoint-and-other-packages","category-presentation-tips","category-reviews-case-studies"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.awareplus.co.uk\/presentation-skills-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/817","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.awareplus.co.uk\/presentation-skills-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.awareplus.co.uk\/presentation-skills-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.awareplus.co.uk\/presentation-skills-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.awareplus.co.uk\/presentation-skills-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=817"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/www.awareplus.co.uk\/presentation-skills-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/817\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.awareplus.co.uk\/presentation-skills-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=817"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.awareplus.co.uk\/presentation-skills-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=817"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.awareplus.co.uk\/presentation-skills-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=817"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}