Thursday, March 15th, 2007

Giving better presentations – an early lesson



Having recently completed my first public speaking engagement for the SUGUK I had the misfortune to experience some of the ‘live demo’ demons. I think I managed to recover, and even received a round of applause when the Excel sheet was rendered in the browser, but it did hit home to me that I need to update my toolkit to help cope with future presentations. Darren Strange (Office Rocker) has posted a really good post ‘Death by PowerPoint – Giving better presentations‘. It was also very reassuring to see that even seasoned professionals have off days :)

Whilst looking for ways to improve my presenting I came across the following that may be useful.

Jeffery Veen – Seven Steps to better presentations
Apple -v- Microsoft – the different presenting styles
How to get a standing ovation – Point 4. Know your audience would have really helped me as I was planning to do a demo coding against the Excel Web Services. I did not know the audience was mostly admins until I had to offer them a preference. Had I found this out up front I could have tweaked the presentation but kept it slick.

What next:- Learn some stories, practice, practice and practice more. Be confident and talk from the heart about things I am passionate about – like MOSS 2007 :)

  • colin
    Andrew,


    Sometimes the Gods just tend to be against you,

    I'm due to do a presentation tomorrow, my laptop has just died and on my second machine a VM that has worked fine for 2 months now fails completely.



    Here's two sites that you should check out.

    The first one should make you feel better



    The ten worst presentation moments

    http://www.microsoft.com/uk/atwork/work/presentationdisasters.mspx



    And this is Don Box on technical presentations

    http://channel9.msdn.com/ShowPost.aspx?PostID=31792



    Best not to follow all of Don Box's advice tho!

    I saw Don at TechEd2000 he spent the whole talk behind the presentation podium wearing a long black TechEd t-shirt he had been forced to wear.

    A the end of the talk he stepped out and revealed that to protest against being forced to wear it that was all he was wearing.



    cheers,

    Colin Byrne
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