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Powerpoint and Posters

 

Duration of Presentation

All oral presentations shall be 20 minutes in duration including question time.

 

Powerpoint Presentations

Any person giving an oral presentation with the aid of Powerpoint is requested to submit the presentation via E-mail to environ2006@ucd.ie by 23 January 2006. This will facilitate the auto linking of presentations on the day. This will greatly reduce delays in getting presentations started. Submitting in advance will also facilitate the checking of presentations for potential problems on the computers which will be used on the day.

 

Guidelines for keeping your Powerpoint presentation small and trouble free

  • The single greatest cause of bloated Powerpoint presentations is the use of overly large images.

  • The majority of data projectors operate with a resolution of 1024 by 786 pixels or less.

  • Higher resolution images will not project any clearer no matter how large.

  • Size landscape images (intended to fill the width of a Powerpoint slide) to a max width of 1024 pixels.

  • Size portrait images (intended to fill the height of a Powerpoint slide) to a max height of 768 pixels.

  • Size images intended to be used smaller proportionately e.g. image to fill one quarter of a powerpoint slide can be sized to 512 by 384 pixels.

  • If you are using Photoshop use the save for web feature and select Gif as the file format for illustrations or Jpeg for photos. Click on the 2 up view to see the original and exported image side by side. Adjusting the quality slider down will greatly reduce the file size but will also degrade the image. Set the slider at a slightly higher quality than that at which degradation of the image becomes noticable and click save.

  • If you have an image editing package other than Photoshop a good rule of thumb is to save as a Jpeg file with a quality setting between 30 and 40%.

  • Always save with a different file name so as not to overwrite your original.

  • Never copy an image from another program and paste it into Powerpoint. Use the insert picture from file command from the insert menu. Copying an open image means that you are copying uncompressed image data. Inserting an already compressed image can keep the file size down.

  • Case Study: a speaker loaded a CD-ROM containing his presentation onto a PC. The transition from slide 1 to slide 2 took 30 seconds, from slide 2-3 took 1 minute, from slide 3-4 took 2 minutes and at this point the PC froze from lack of memory. On investigation it turned out that the powerpoint file was 485Mb in size – practically the whole CD. There were 20 images in the presentation, each with a file size of approx 30Mb. The CD was taken and the presentation reworked according to the steps listed above. The entire presentation was returned to the speaker on a floppy disk and the Powerpoint file size was 1.1Mb. The resulting presentation was of no lesser quality than the one on the CD.

  • Be conservative in the use of typefaces. Any non standard typeface may only be available on your computer and not on the machine you will use to give your talk. If for example you prepare a powerpoint file with Copperplate font it may look spectacular. When the file is loaded on a different computer without Copperplate a substitute font is used (quite often it is Courier). This can cause text to overflow the margins and/or the bottom of the slide. Keep to the typefaces that are usually installed with Powerpoint/Office i.e. Times New Roman, Helvetica, Arial, Verdana. When using symbols try to use Symbol font as special characters in other typefaces may not translate to another system.

  • Excel graphs can occasionally lose formatting in Powerpoint, usually on the vertical axis. This can be overcome by viewing your graph as large as possible within Excel and then taking a screenshot (print screen/ copy screen). The resulting image file can then be processed as above. The advantage here is that the contents of this image will not change. The disadvantages are that you are stuck with the original background from excel and double clicking on the graph will not allow you to update it in Excel.

  • Demonstration screens from other computer programs can be imported into Powerpoint by taking a screen grab.

 

Posters

Posters should be no larger than A0 (90 by 120 cm) preferably but not necessarily in portrait orientation.

 

Overheads and 35mm slides

Should you need an overhead projector or 35mm slide projector please let us know by 20th January.