During a presentation, the Presenter View can be a real help! You get to read your notes and see what slides are coming up next, while the audience sees only the slides. Usually, if you’re presenting off a laptop or desktop computer, you can make the Presenter View visible on your screen while projecting the slides onto the main screen. But sometimes it doesn’t quite work out like that.
Reviewing presentations in Presenter View
I was hired to provide training on how to create and present Ignite presentations. I had finalized the curriculum three weeks before the training session and hadn’t thought about it much after that. So the night before the first day of class, I decided to review the three presentations I’d be showing.
When I give a presentation, I pretty much know what I’m going to say for each slide. When I practice in Presenter View, I can see my speaker notes and the next slide in the presentation. The speaker notes are there to remind me to talk about certain things, to customize the course for the client, and to create the presentation handouts that are distributed to students. In this case, reviewing the curriculum the night before was a very good idea.
A weird, unfamiliar setup
I always show up to my classrooms at least an hour before go time. This gives me plenty of time to hook up my laptop, familiarize myself with the AV setup, and do any troubleshooting that may be needed before the students arrive. When I got there, I connected my laptop to the large LCD screen on the wall using an HDMI cable. Then my host asked if I’d received the meeting invite she’d emailed me.
The what-what now?
It turned out that they wanted me to present using BlueJeans, an online meeting platform that I had never heard of. The BlueJeans interface would be projected onto the wall screen, so the HDMI cable wouldn’t be used.
This meant that instead of being able to use my laptop as the confidence monitor and the wall screen for the presentation, I had to use show the presentation on both the laptop and the wall screen so that it would display correctly in BlueJeans. In other words, I wouldn’t be able to refer to my speaker notes for the next three and a half hours.
Knowing your presentation cold
You know how I’m always telling you not to put too much text on a slide? That’s how I design my own presentations, too. The problem with clean, spare slide design is that you no longer have bullet points to rely on that tell you what to say. Fortunately, I follow another piece of advice you might have heard from me: know your presentation. Because I’d reviewed the day’s presentations the night before, I knew what I was supposed to talk about for each slide. The class proceeded without a problem that the attendees would notice.
Technology fails me a second time
After class, a student told me that it is possible to do a dual-screen presentation in BlueJeans. So when I got back to my place, I found the solution online and tried it out using the meeting link I’d received that morning. It worked! Presenter view for me, slide view online. Perfect.
Except that it didn’t work at all the next day with a new meeting link.
As before, I had reviewed the day’s presentations that morning before I arrived onsite so I didn’t have a problem.
The takeaway
If you are an instructor or public speaker, I can guarantee you with 10,000% certainty that there will come a time when things don’t go as planned for your presentation. But the more you review, prepare, and practice, the less you’ll be affected by those inevitable snafus.