Every Tuesday I publish a short post with quick, consumable presentation tips. Here is Tip #4.
Presentations are events in and of themselves. There are so many moving parts that just one misstep - one missing piece can jeopardize the entire thing. I learned this first hand just the other day, during an evening presentation.
I thought I had checked everything. I had my laptop, my presentation (in multiple formats), speakers (I include a few videos), extension cord, power surge, presentation remote and more. I entered the room I was to present in and started taking out my equipment. I was there nice and early - 45 minutes before my talk was scheduled to begin - and felt perfectly comfortable.
Then, it happened. I realized I had forgotten a key piece of equipment - my adapter. Unfortunately, Macs don't have a VGA input, or any direct input for that matter, for a projector to connect to. Thus, I need an adapter to connect my MacBook Pro to a projector. Well, I didn't have it, and it started to get prettaaayyy, prettaaayyyy hot in there. If I couldn't connect to the projector, there was no way for my audience to see my slides. When presenting about presentation design - BIG no no. The audience was coming whether I had my adapter or not, so I had to figure out a solution.
In this case, I was lucky. The room was equipped with a desktop PC and media cabinet. Since my presentation uses multiple original fonts, simply moving the PowerPoint from my Mac to the PC desktop wouldn't work. However, since I don't use much animation, I saved the PowerPoint out to a PDF, transferred the PDF to the PC via a flash drive, and presented to the PDF. The only difference was that I had to manually play the videos. No big deal.
To avoid presentation mishaps like this one, make sure to equip yourself with a presentation checklist. My colleague John Zimmer wrote up a great one available here. Be religious about it and add to it as needed. It's not a failsafe, so make sure you understand what to do if equipment fails.
Being prepared is instrumental to delivering a great presentation. However with so many moving parts, there are numerous obstacles you could face. However, it's not how well you minimize your mistakes that define you, but how well you deal with the ones that arise.