Scott Hanselman (who does a LOT of presentations) adds some more presentation tips here.

It reminded me that I wanted to share one I learned from Paul Litwin while I was at DevConnections.

How to avoid showing ugly powerpoint IDE.
Since I have all of my shortcuts on my desktop, I would have to stop PowerPoint, minimize it and go to the shortcut I need.  (this reminds me – I hate when someone does that and you can see their speaker notes. It always makes me think someone else wrote the content and they are not the expert.) Normally, I have all of my vs.net projects running and I just alttab between them. But in this case I was running whidbey demos and did not want to chance having multiple instances running on a box with only 512MB RAM. So I had to get to the desktop and you can’t alt-tab to desktop icons. Paul suggested this great idea. Create a folder on the desktop and have that open. Then you can alt-tab to the folder and click on your shortcuts without having to stop the powerpoint. I still sometimes just stop the powerpoint – that’s a habit to break.

I think there was something else he taught me that was new for me, but I have to remember which it was.

Another one hard learned from me
If you are having trouble sleeping the night before a morning presentation and you have to take something to help you sleep, make sure you take something that will do the trick! I took two Tylenol pms at 3:20 in the morning knowing I had to get up at 8am. Somehow I still did not sleep. So when I did get up, the Tylenols’ basically had the effect of my feeling drugged which is a lot worse than being tired. And it did affect my presentation – just in some really stupid ways – which I am still really upset about. I’m really not someone who likes taking anything at all – I will suffer through a headache rather than take aspirin or go for something homeopathic than allapathic. But I think this is a good warning nonetheless!

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