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Carry a Back-Up

What can you do to stay ahead of these common gliches?

1. Save on cd, floppy, USB "thumb" drive, or other media a BACKUP COPY. Choose the option of including the PowerPoint Player. This will protect you against two eventualities:

a. Your laptop plays hide-n-seek with your presentation file, but does not itself crash.


b. Your laptop crashes. Now you have the possibility of borrowing another laptop and running your presentation on that replacement machine. If that replacement does not have PowerPoint installed you can use the PowerPoint Player (installable, requiring no new bootup) to drive your presentation.

 

2. Print out handouts of your program, enough for those gathered. Use these even if your presentation software and computer work.

3. Have your presentation memorized - at least the outline of it. This will help you whether your technological tools work or not. Use of Presentation Software is no replacement for practicing and polishing your words.

If the story below is painful to you, it's because the same thing has happened to you. Do you make a Backup Copy, now. If you haven't yet experienced this, don't just refuse to use technology. Expect the best; plan for the worst.

Yesterday, a colleague felt the pain that so many public speakers experience as they attempt to use new technologies. Hers was the last presentation of the day here in Richmond, Virginia at a pre-biennial meeting. At lunch time she checked her laptop. Her PowerPoint file and program were ready to go. She shut if off and worked on other tasks.

Later in the day, five minutes before she was to speak, she pulled her laptop out of the bag. She turned it on, opened the PowerPoint program, looked for the presentation file and found only other presentations. Fortunately, the most experienced of techies was around in the persons of our national webmasters. Unfortunately, they could not find the file either. Her computer could have run any of several other presentations, but the one she needed was gone.

She had no other copy of the presentation file. What did she do? Fortunately, she had printed out a copy of the slides with her notes - 1 copy - and used that to guide her comments. She apologized for the presence of projector and screen and the absence of the presentation, "... but the pictures were so beautiful!"

In this case - since her laptop had not itself failed - if she had made and carried with her a backup copy of her presentation, she would have been fine. This could have been in the form of a CD she burned or even a floppy disc (PowerPoint will surprise you in how much it can compress your data with its Pack N Go features).

I have a feeling that when she returns to her office and looks again for that file, that it will mysteriously appear again. Given more than five minutes before the program the techies present may very well have found the file. But all this frustration could have been averted with a backup copy.

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