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Sounds awfully familiar, but good to see nonetheless. More people
should read this.
<<I have to agree that PPT presentations can be really boring. To
those of you who do training and public speaking, what are your tips
for creating interesting presentations?>>
There are three keys to a successful presentation: keep it short and
focused, speak about something the audience will want to hear about,
and speak well enough and in such a way as to engage your audience.
There are also many other things you can do to make a presentation
work, including: <http://www.geoff-hart.com/articles/2004/presentations.htm
>. That's not an exhaustive list, but it's enough to make most
presentations work well. (These are the rules I follow, and I usually
rate in the top 5 to 10% of speakers at STC conferences. Yes, I'm
braggiing. <g>)
When I do training, I try to keep the sessions short (no more than
about 1.5 hours without a break), and limit workshops to about 6 hours
per day; in my experience, people tend to drop off to sleep with
longer sessions, and just about nobody is still alive at the end of an
8-hour workshop. Varying the pacing, such as by regularly coaxing the
audience into providing feedback and regularly switching from
lecturing to working on exercises, is also a great trick.
Free Software Documentation Project Web Cast: Covers developing Table of
Contents, Context IDs, and Index, as well as Doc-To-Help
2009 tips, tricks, and best practices. http://www.doctohelp.com/SuperPages/Webcasts/
Help & Manual 5: The complete help authoring tool for individual
authors and teams. Professional power, intuitive interface. Write
once, publish to 8 formats. Multi-user authoring and version control! http://www.helpandmanual.com/
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