Have you had to sit in a conference hall for five or ten minutes while the presenter struggles

to get their laptop working with the projector? The presenter occasionally apologizes to the

crowd, and there are a few murmurs of sympathy, but everyone is really thinking to themselves

something like "50 people, let's say an average salary of $20/hour, at 10 minutes,

that's...". On the other hand, have you ever been that presenter?

This is a guide to help you avoid the common mistakes associated with connecting your laptop to

a projector for a presentation. I created this after seeing countless people either having

difficulty getting setup at the start of their presentations, or whose laptops did strange and

unexpected things during the presentation. If it was helpful to you, or if you have some

suggestions for improvement, please let me know. I have also produced a separate guide called

Troubleshooting connections from a laptop to a projector, for the more

serious technical glitches which can occur during the setup.

Before we begin, here's a few things to bear in mind:

Before your trip - You should try to familiarize yourself with the topics and practice

this before you take your trip, and take the summary as a guide to refer to while you are

at the conference.

Technology - This guide assumes you are using Windows® and PowerPoint®, but the

issues should be easy to relate to other platforms and applications. It is also targeted at

people making conference presentations, but the same issues pretty much apply for the upcoming

"big presentation to the board".

Fancy stuff - There are lots of fancy ways to use PowerPoint, including a funky

interface that looks different on your laptop than on the projector (the dancing Paperclip will

probably love to tell you all about it). This guide is about connecting your laptop for

plain-vanilla presentations. My friendly warning: the more fancy you get, the more chance for

error. Oh, and if you think that this is out-dated and Windows XP® solves all of the bugs

inherent in this process - Ha!

Configure your laptop to avoid unexpected surprises

These are things you should do in your hotel room, or at least before you get to the

presentation room.

Pack your power supply, and charge your batteries

You could be delayed in presenting, and you don't want your battery giving up half way through

your talk. Therefore, always use the mains power when you can. The reason to have your batteries

charged is that sometimes you will not find a power outlet.

• For the presentation, you always want to run your laptop from the power
  
  supply, and have the battery as a back-up only.

Don't let your computer sleep

You want to tell your computer that it can't take a nap. If you don't, then the hard drive

might stop spinning which causes a delay in bringing up an image or chart during your

presentation; or worse still, your computer just goes to sleep and blanks out the projection just

as you are discussing the most critical slide.

• Open the Power Management Control Panel. Chose the [Always On] power
  
  scheme.

For some reason, Microsoft thinks that [Always On] should mean that certain things can go to

sleep after a time, and so you should be careful to ensure that all options in this dialog

box are set to turn off [Never]. Once the presentation is over, you can get back to saving the

planet with your preferred power-saving settings.

Make your desktop background blank

For the next few steps you need to open the Display Properties Control Panel. If you

have a picture of your favorite pop star as your wallpaper, get rid of it. It doesn't matter that

you think he/she is the greatest. If your audience sees it during setup you will be pre-judged on

your tastes.

• Use the Background tab in the Control Panel, and set the
  
  background to [none].
  If you have files on your desktop with names like "List of people to fire next
  
  week.doc", or "Things_I_have_stolen.xls", you might want to think about hiding
  
  these.

Turn off your Screen saver

Screen Savers usually kick in during the question and answer session at the end, where you are

talking rather than moving through slides, and hence the computer times-out and pops up the screen

saver. Not very professional.

• Staying in the Display Properties Control Panel, click the Screen
  
  Saver tab and change the setting for your screen saver to [none].

Set your screen resolution to 800x600

Most presentation slides made in PowerPoint will show perfectly well in 800x600 screen

resolution, regardless of the screen resolution your laptop was set on when you created the

slides. Most projectors will accept an 800x600 setting and display it pretty well (more on this

later during setup). I hear you saying "...but it looks nicer in 1024x768...". I know

it does, but everyone managed quite well enough in the past with 800x600, and this guide is all

about minimizing risk. Do higher resolutions at your own risk¹ - good luck!

• Click the Settings tab in the Display Properties Control Panel,
  
  and move the slider marked Screen resolution to [800x600].

Turn the sound off

Noises from your laptop are distracting! This is an especially important point if you use sound

schemes with swishing sounds for new windows and so on.

• If you have a master volume control knob on the side of your laptop, turn it
  
  to zero, or go into the volume control panel and set it to "mute".

If your computer needs to make sounds during the presentation, you might want to think about

getting rid of the sound scheme temporarily:

• Go into the Sounds Control Panel and set the sound scheme to [no
  
  sounds].

Turn off all Alerts

If during your normal work life you enjoy (or put up with) your email client popping up a

dialog box which says "You have new mail, would you like to read it now?", or

"Alert... Can't connect to the network to check mail!", then you need to make some

changes. If these alerts pop up during your presentation, you will look like a plum.

• Turn off all alerts, or better still turn off applications which use
  
  alerts.

Arrive early and test your setup

You need to arrive early enough to do the following steps in this section. Normally this will

mean arriving at the presentation room as the previous session ends. If you arrive 5 minutes

before your presentation to set up (because you just had to stop and talk to Bob whom you

haven't seen in years), then just remember that you are putting out fifty or so people, and can't

Bob could wait until bar-time later?

If your presentation is in the first session of the morning, you may want to test the setup the

night before. A few things to remember:

Technicians - If things don't work, you may need to get help from the technicians. Most

conferences have staff to help with setup problems. Know that these people are usually busiest at

the start of the conference, and especially busy in the few minutes before the start of each of

the session on the first day because of troubleshooting other people's setups.

Student help - Many conferences have student helpers assigned to each room. Use them in

the event of problems. They should be the ones running around finding the technicians - not

you!

Setup rooms - See if the conference has a setup room which has identical projectors to

those in the presentation halls. You can use this room to determine the best setup between your

laptop and the projector.

Meet the session chair and other presenters

On many occasions you will not know or have met the session chair, or the other presenters,

ahead of time. They will want to meet you and perhaps talk to you about your paper, or at least

get your name pronunciation correct. Extend them the courtesy or being early.

• Once you have shook hands and smiled... excuse yourself so you can get
  
  cracking on setting up your equipment.
• If your session chair is late (because he is out talking to Bob...)
  
  then don't hang about - you have work to do!

Check the microphone setup

The audience needs to be able to hear you, and just because they could hear the last presenter

does not mean they can necessarily hear you the way you want to hold the microphone.

• If a microphone is needed, it should be there. Try it and try to determine if
  
  people will be able to hear from the back. If not, you will usually need to get a
  
  technician.

Plug the laptop into the projector cord

At the back of your laptop is a connector with an icon that looks like the shape of a screen.

That's what you'll be using.

• Have your laptop up and running with the PowerPoint presentation showing, and
  
  then plug the cord from the projector into the back of your laptop.
• Don't bother screwing it in if you don't have to (this only slows things down
  
  during the changeover between presenters).
• Make sure the projector is plugged in and running (it will be making noise
  
  from the fan, and probably emitting some heat).

Cycle the screen output from your laptop

There is usually a key on your keyboard marked Fn (short for function), and it is

usually a different color to the rest of the key markings (e.g. light blue, or brown). There is

also a row of icons or text on other keys, in the same color as the Fn key, which will

activate some function when the Fn key is held down. Find the key which has a picture of a

screen, or the words CRT/LCD or something similar (there is no standard, unfortunately). This key

cycles where the video signal gets sent from the computer.

• Hold the Fn key down and press the screen cycling key repeatedly, allowing
  
  at least a couple of seconds between each key press. The screen image should cycle the
  
  following modes:
• Laptop Screen and Projector together (This is what you want²).
• Projector Only.
• Laptop Screen Only.

If it works, good! You're 95% of the way there, and just a few more steps (below).

• If it doesn't work, you'll be glad you arrived early... see Troubleshooting connections from a laptop to a projector.

Check your slides visually on the projector

Color - Projectors can do funny things to colors. If you have charts or diagrams, you

may find that the colors which look nice on your laptop screen don't look quite the same on the

projector screen. You don't want to be apologizing during your presentation if you can help it.

Note: if you use something in addition to color to denote a chart element (e.g. cross-hatching),

you will avoid this problem.

Video clip output - If you are showing a video clip (AVI or MPEG file, or output from

your DVD player) then you may find that the output will only show on the projector screen and NOT

on your laptop screen. Nothing is broken, it is just that the graphics card in your computer can

only send these formats to one screen at a time. You may want to know this in advance of going to

the conference.

Fonts - Check that your font is reasonably readable from the back of the room. If not,

you may want to change something on problem slides.

Important stuff at the bottom of the screen - You might have a slide with a

hyper-critical statement, the crux of your presentation, the thing they all came to hear. If you

put this statement is along the bottom of the screen, and the projector image is set up such that

the bottom of the screen is obscured by peoples' heads, then you will have a problem. People will

be craning their neck to see. Important stuff goes near the top, unless you are 100% certain that

everyone will be able to see the bottom of the screen.

Disconnect, and leave your laptop in the same configuration, but...

Disconnect your laptop if others have to test their setup too. Depending on your laptop, you

may have two more things to do...

Load every page - This depends on the speed of your laptop and the complexity of your

pages. Basically, during your presentation you will want to have each slide appear instantly.

You can ensure this by "pre-loading" every page. Just make every page appear on your

laptop screen once before you get up and present. This process might eliminate the one or two

second page loads during your talk. Again, this depends on your laptop.

Cycle your screen again - Depending on how clever the builders of your laptop were,

there may be a need to cycle your screen again (with the "Fn" key) when it comes

time to get up and present. This is because the laptop might automatically detect that it is not

connected to an external monitor/projector. You'll know when you get up to present and plug the

cable back in: if you get a blank screen, just cycle it again with the "Fn" key

per above.

Find out more..

This piece has been about the technology basics, but there's much more you can learn to help

you in improving your presentation abilities.

• Read a book on presentation skills! (I recommend this for everyone!).
• Go search the web for more tips.
• Ask your peers about their bad experiences.
• Go on a course.
• Learn some of the cool features in PowerPoint (there are some, honest!)

Summary Checklist

Well in advance of your talk, configure your laptop to avoid unexpected surprises:

1. Pack your power supply, and charge your batteries
2. Don't let your computer sleep
3. Make your desktop background blank
4. Turn off your Screen saver
5. Set your screen resolution to 800x600
6. Turn the sound off
7. Turn off all Alerts

Arrive early and test your setup:

1. Meet the session chair and other presenters
2. Check the microphone setup
3. Plug the laptop into the projector cord
4. Cycle the screen output from your laptop
5. Check your slides visually on the projector
6. Disconnect, and leave your laptop in the same configuration, but load every page, and
   
   Cycle the screen again if necessary when your reconnect.

• If it doesn't work... see Troubleshooting connections
  
  from a laptop to a projector
• Remember... Technicians, Student Help, Setup rooms