Guidelines for Oral Presentations

The IADR website has good advice on creating slides and slide shows for oral presentations and useful recommendations on technical aspects of animations and movie formats (http://www.aadronline.org/i4a/pages/index.cfm?pageid=3758).

Here are some guidelines for the Hinman Student Research Symposium:

  • You will have about 12 minutes for your presentation with 3 to 5 minutes for questions and discussion.
  • The meeting room for the oral sessions will be equipped with laser pointers, a screen, one 35 mm slide projector, one LCD projector, and a Windows XP PC running Office 2007.
  • There will be no internet access to the computer at the Peabody Hotel. You will need to bring your computer file(s) on disk or submit them in advance.
  • Your slide show should be loaded onto the computer at the Hinman Symposium registration desk on Friday afternoon, or submitted in advance.

Preparing your media to bring to the meeting:

  • Save your files to a CD-ROM, a USB flash drive, a Zip 100 disk, or a 3.5’’ disk. No DVDs.
  • If you burn your files to a CD, be sure to close or “finalize” the disk.
  • Include any external files such as movie files in the same folder as your slide show and copy the entire folder to the disk.

You may submit your slide show in advance by sending the files (5 MB or less) as an attachment to HinmanSymposium@utmem.edu or by sending a disk by mail to the address above. We’ll view the slide show and let you know if we see problems, but we won’t know how you think it should look. For safety and to allow last minute changes, please bring a final copy of the slide show with you.

For Windows users:

  • Many Adobe Type Library fonts will be available in addition to fonts that are included with Windows. However, not all fonts will be available. In PowerPoint or Acrobat Distiller, follow the directions to embed all fonts.

For Macintosh users:

  • Slide shows created with Mac versions of PowerPoint will usually run on the PC. Embedded QuickTime files do not run properly, but can be opened and run as separate files. Be sure to bring the QuickTime files. Slide shows created with Apple’s Keynote software should be converted to PowerPoint files.
  • In PowerPoint, Windows fonts will be substituted for Mac fonts, and differences in font sizes can create problems such as lines of text running off the edge. Andale Mono, Arial, Comic Sans MS, Georgia, Impact, Tahoma, Times New Roman, Trebuchet MS, and Verdana are recommended.
  • Saving your slide show as a PDF file with all fonts embedded is the safest way to ensure that it will appear as you intended. However, PDF files will not contain animations or movies. Create your PDF files with a page size of 10’’ wide by 7.5’’ high.
  • Please preview your slide show on a Windows PC.

Some common problems to avoid:

In recent years, one student forgot to bring his slide show, one student brought a disk that turned out to be empty, one student brought a slide show belonging to another student, two students brought early versions of their slide shows rather than the final versions they planned to present, one brought a slide show with animations created in Office XP that wouldn’t run in Office 2000, two students brought slide shows with links to movie files but did not bring the movie files, and one student brought a slide show created using a MAC-specific font that was converted to Courier on the PC and ran off the edge of the slide.

Please double-check that you have a working copy of your slide show with you.

PRINTABLE PDF FORMAT