Use Your Own Computer
Last week I had the pleasure of doing a presentation on “The Importance of English” at Korea University’s Business School in Seoul. There were three of us each doing a twenty minute segment and each part was related to why English is important in today’s business world.
When I do a presentation, I always think very carefully about the font I use. As I have mentioned here before, the font you use helps to create the right atmosphere for your presentation. I decided to use “Impact” as my main font for this presentation because it has a very strong sense and it creates an atmosphere of importance and urgency – just my humble opinion.
After collecting my colleagues presentations to put into one file, I went through the whole presentation and made sure that we were using a unified font and style. As usual I saved a copy of my presentation in PowerPoint on a small USB drive in case there were any technical problems.
When we arrived at the venue, the organiser informed me that their system did not work with Apple Computers – I therefore kindly asked her if I could try and make it work. She of course agreed. Fortunately for me, my computer did work and we were able to do our presentation as it was prepared.
However, after being told my computer would not work with their system all colour drained from my face and fear spread throughout my body. After spending many hours checking and rechecking my presentation, I knew that the university’s computer would not have the font I used. Had I used my backup PowerPoint file on the university’s computer my whole presentation would just look wrong.
I realised that if you want to make sure that your presentation looks good, as you prepared it, then you need to insist that the venue where you do your presentation allows you to use your computer. There is nothing worse than using someone else’s computer and finding that they do not have the font you used or that they are using a different version of Powerpoint to you.
You spent a long time preparing your presentation, making it look right and making the animations work as you like them. It is your presentation. Do not allow all your hard work and effort fall down simply because you are asked to use someone else’s computer.
