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Re: Making a presentation to an audience

• To: mathgroup at smc.vnet.net
• Subject: [mg58363] Re: Making a presentation to an audience
• From: AES <siegman at stanford.edu>
• Date: Tue, 28 Jun 2005 21:56:57 -0400 (EDT)
• Organization: Stanford University
• References: <d9r553$57f$1@smc.vnet.net>
• Sender: owner-wri-mathgroup at wolfram.com

In article <d9r553$57f$1 at smc.vnet.net>,
 "Hugh Goyder" <h.g.d.goyder at cranfield.ac.uk> wrote:

> d) Any more good ideas or tips for presentations. Perhaps there are things
> you can do in Mathematica that you can't in a PowerPoint presentation?
> 
> If I can make a good slide show notebook that can be used as a template I
> will put it together and offer it to the information centre.
> 

If you're happy with how your Mathematica notebook looks on screen for 
slide show presentations, that of course gives you a lot of freedom to 
run animations, or even do new calculations right there on the screen 
during the presentation or in response to audience questions.  I think 
many people on this group will encourage you in finding or developing 
and sharing a notebook presentation style that will work well for this.

Making presentations straight from Mathematica can also be very good 
advertising for Mathematica, which will make Wolfram and also many of us 
happy.

There may come a day, however, when your computer fails just as you 
start the talk, or it just won't talk to some projector; and no one else 
there has a backup.

The "belt and suspenders" approach here is to print or export a backup 
copy of your notebook to a PDF file and carry it along on a memory stick 
or CD.  (My wife now has a neat little small-size Swiss Army knife that 
has a small knife blade, fingernail file, tiny scissors, LED flashlight 
-- and a 256 MB USB flash memory.  Unfortunately you still can't take it 
through airport security.)

The Acrobat Reader software is free, universally available everywhere on 
essentially all platforms, highly reliable, and provides excellent 
projection capabilities.  You can share your notebooks with others in 
PDF format if you want to.  And if you move up to Adobe Acrobat or 
Acrobat Pro, there are a lot of additional editing tricks and 
manipulations you can add to the notebook copy.