Pinderkent

Through my work, I get to visit and work with many different businesses and organizations each year. And like anyone involved in business, meetings happen (far too) frequently, and they often include presentations. Although I don't have to give them very often, I do get to sit through them frequently enough. As laptop computers and projectors have become more prevalent, we've seen slideshows and similar presentations become used more often. While major mistakes can be made easily enough when using whiteboards, handouts and other presentation media, the laptop/projector/PowerPoint combination makes mistakes almost certain for some people.

By "mistakes" I don't mean minor stumbles while speaking, momentarily forgetting what to say, and so forth. I'm talking about incidents that can, within a few seconds, ruin the reputation of the presenter and the party or parties they may represent, or perhaps put an end to a valuable deal that has been in the works for some time. Although somewhat rare, they do happen more frequently than they probably should.

Those who have sat through enough presentations will no doubt have seen scenarios where a rogue popup alert window, often from a networked application like and email client or an instant messenging client, inadvertently displays some unsavory or very personal information. Similarly, some malware may open popups with various advertisements that do no reflect well on the presenter. Another major problem is personal and/or inappropriate photographs accidentally being displayed as thumbnails in the file browser while the presenter is starting to open their presentation. And sometimes laptop users have set a sound file to automatically play when their laptop turns on, but forget to turn down the speaker volume before turning their laptop on before the presentation.

Matt Hulett recently gave some tips to help avoid such mistakes. With respect to his first two tips, one good method of achieving that is, as mentioned by one of the commenters, to have a separate account on the laptop solely for presentations. I know some frequent presenters who take that a step further, and have separate accounts for each presentation, to avoid having the presentation for one group inadvertently displayed to another.

Some of those presenters even have a separate laptop they use just for presentations, and another laptop computer they use for work and personal purposes. I know one fellow in particular who uses a very minimalistic installation of Debian on his laptop. He doesn't even bother with installing a desktop environment, instead just using twm. Essentially, he has stripped his presentation laptop down to the bare minimum needed to make his presentations, and by doing so has eliminated many of the possible causes of major incidents. One thing he even told me is that he uses a shell session running in xterm to navigate his filesystem and start his presentations, to help avoid unintentionally revealing unwanted information to his audience.

With some care, preparation and forethought, it's often relatively easy to make a presentation go well. But it's also quite easy to be in a rush and forget something minor, such as closing down a running email client. Soon enough this can balloon out into an angry audience, and possibly even the end of valuable business relationships. A secondary, minimalistic, presentation-only laptop with separate user accounts for each presentation will go a long way towards preventing some of the most common incidents. Adequate preparation usually takes care of the rest. And if all goes well, the presentation will be a success.