How I Build Presentations, day 1: Research and Plan
For the rest of the posts in this series, please see the series index.
I tend to do a lot of presentations for work and in my free time too, and over the past few years—through trial and error and presentation courses—I have learned a bunch of tricks to prepare for one. What I am hoping to do with this series of posts is to catalogue, each day, what I have to do in preparation for a specific session. The hope is that through this, maybe my tricks can help you in the future.
The first tip I can impart is that I never get up in the morning, prep a presentation, and give it the same day. Why? Because to properly prepare, even a short presentation can take days to get right, and the more technical or complex the topic, the longer it can take. The presentation I will build over this series ended up as a two-hour presentation, but it took me almost six days of preparation.
Currently, our team is using Basecamp for task management.
The easiest part of preparing a presentation is getting a topic, because all I need to do is go to my task list and see what has been assigned to me—in this case, .NET Threading. Based on the type (this is a Technical Readiness (TR) session), I know what type of audience to expect and what level. However, I have no other ideas of how long it will be, whether I’ll present using demos, slides, both, or neither, or anything else. This will all emerge from the process.
The way I start with a presentation is to fire up PowerPoint and start dumping ideas onto slides. What I am doing here is not creating content, although some of it will remain as content in the finished presentation. What I am actually doing is setting up a storyboard for my thoughts. PowerPoint works great as a storyboard system, and it has the benefit that later on, the content that remains does not have to be recreated. At this point, there is no spell-checking or grammar-checking, nor any animations.
However, there are three things in the storyboard at this stage:
- Thoughts: slides with just titles or a few words, representing something I think I should bring up but haven’t yet prepared content for.
- Basic content: while it’s a storyboard, there is some basic content (often messy and unstructured) that I think will be useful.
- Mistakes: I make loads of mistakes—which is a good thing because I’ll go through the tough learning and make them so that others do not need to.
The day 1 storyboard of my presentation
The actual process of getting content for a presentation is fairly mundane. It involves searching on Google, StackOverflow, and SlideShare, and adding information I’ve already gathered.