3 Checks for Stress-free Slides

Your team spends weeks creating and polishing the perfect slides to pair with the keynote presentation. And then, when it’s time to deliver, the text is running off the screen, the fonts don’t look right… in short, it’s a disaster.

At JP, we deliver a stress-free AV experience with a zero-glitch guarantee, so we have spent a lot of time checking slide decks to make sure meetings go well.

So here’s 3 quick things I check for in our over 150 events per year to make sure presentations always go off without a hitch.

#1 Always Check Fonts

The first thing I always check for is fonts.

If you open a presentation and the fonts aren’t embedded, sometimes you can get slides where the formatting is off.

One hack for this if you’re on a Mac is that you can open the presentation in Keynote and it will tell you if your system is missing any of the fonts you need.

In your Power Point Options/ Save sub-menu, just make sure to make sure you have the “fonts embedded” box checked. It will make the file size larger, but it’s much better than playing a guessing game later.

Another pro tip: If you’re making your slides in Canva or Keynote, you can’t embed the fonts. One way around it is to export the slides as a PDF or as images (JPG), and then re-build the presentation with those images to make sure all the formatting is perfect. Just know if you do it this way, you’re exporting an image, so you can’t have any builds or animations. You CAN add in transitions between slides.

#2 Check for Formatting

The second thing I check for is formatting. Especially when the fonts mis-match, you can get weird formatting issues between different computers. I always look to see if anything feels weird about the slide. This is a bit more of a ‘gut reaction’ and helps us figure out if anything is off.

(A note if you’re using a Mac, you can never use the “Preview” as a guide. This is ALWAYS off. Actually open the presentation for a real look at it.)

Additionally, in this step I want to look at the aspect ratio. If we have a widescreen and the presenter is using an old ‘standard’ 4:3 deck, I can change the ratio to fill our screen. This won’t work for all decks (especially with charts and images), but sometimes it can just figure it out for you!

#3 Animations and Media

The third thing I check for is any animations and media in the presentation. If you have a video embedded, we are going to extract that file to either play on a separate system, or to have as a backup.

Secondly, I want to ‘feel’ how the presentation advances. If you click a slide and the video auto-plays, then we make a note of that. We want to make sure the presenter understands how that’s going to work in the moment. Often, the better option for less experienced presenters is the “two click” method: the presenter advances the slide and then clicks again to start the media. This saves them if they accidentally click too soon or forget where they are in the deck.

I also check for auto-advancing. Occasionally, some presenters want this feature -- in most cases, it's a mistake. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve come across a keeper slide that auto-advances. When you have a highly produced show, you don’t want slides to be magically moving forward.

Testing Time

Above all, make sure you build in time on site to load and test slide decks. This is why you can’t simply have presenters walk up with flash drives and hope for the best.

It’s important to allow your team time to make sure they can at least do these three checks on site to ensure decks look and perform correctly.

Good luck!