June 4, 2015
Presenting From PDFs
When I give presentations, I generally use Keynote rather than PowerPoint. But I don’t present from Keynote. I always export a PDF and present from that using the full screen slideshow in Preview.app on my laptop or Acrobat on a podium computer.
The advantage to this is that I never have to worry that fonts or images won’t display correctly. My presentation will look exactly the same on any computer.
The disadvantages are that I can’t use animation (not really a disadvantage in my book) and that I don’t get a nice presenter view on my laptop like you do when presenting in Keynote or PowerPoint.
I solve the latter problem with Side Mirror, a great Mac app that will show the slides on the projector in a small window on my laptop screen while presenting.
I also will generally put the PDF of my presentation in my Dropbox public folder. I am forunate to have a three digit Dropbox account ID so as long as I make the file name of my PDF simple, I can type the URL to download my presentation from memory. This is generally how I get my presentation on a podium computer, rather than using a flash drive.
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