Giving Presentations

1
Giving Presentations

• Professor Lawrence A. Rowe
• as interpreted by James Lin
• CS160 Spring 99
• March 29, 1999

2
Outline

• Creating your presentation
• Laying out your slides
• Structuring your presentation
• Practicing your presentation
• Presenting
• Other challenges

3
Creating your presentation

• Use presentation software
• Microsoft PowerPoint (most prevalent)
• Lotus Freelance Graphics
• Harvard Graphics
• Concentrate on content
• Dont spend too much time futzing with colors and
  fonts (especially for presentations in this
  class)
• But dont make it ugly either

4
Laying out your slides

• One major concept per slide
• Use relatively few words on slide
• Limit to only two levels major and minor points
• Start major headings with verbbe active!
• Have only four to five major points
• Magic rule about 1 minute per slide
• Some slides (screen shots) may take less time

5
Laying out your slides (contd)

• If you need more room
• Reduce space between lines
• Make fonts smaller
• Safest bet just use another slide
• Use sans-serif font for title
• Use either serif or sans-serif font for body
• No more than 2 fonts
• Next example slide in professors style

6
Title (Arial Black, 38 point)

• Major point (Garamond, 32 point)
• Minor point (Garamond Italic, 24 point)
• Another major point
• Minor point
• Another minor point

7
Structuring your presentation

• Title slide
• Outline slide
• Important to let audience know where you are
  going
• Detail slides
• Sometimes, outline slide between each major
  concept, highlighting the next concept to be
  discussed
• Summary slide

8
Practicing your presentation

• Why practice?
• Make sure you are within time limit
• Reduce stage fright
• Decide what you need to say before the real thing
• Practice two or three times in front of other
  people
• Get critiques from friends and teammates
• Time yourself

9
Presenting

• Speak to the audience, not to the screen
• Make good eye contact
• Dont stare in any one direction
• Look at many people
• Speak clearlydont mumble

10
Other challenges

• Live demonstrations
• Only works if you test your demo 13 milliseconds
  before the real demo.
• Be careful big risk, but big positive impact if
  it works
• Using multimedia clips
• May require special software
• Make sure software is installed and working well
  before presentation

11
Summary

• Practice, practice, practice, practice, practice,
  practice, practice, practice, practice, practice,
  practice, practice, practice, practice, practice,
  practice, practice, practice, practice, practice,
  practice, practice, practice, practice, practice,
  practice, practice, practice, practice, practice,
  practice, practice, practice, practice, practice,
  and practice!