My daughter (the one off to uni) had to do a presentation to The Rotary Club after they sponsored her on a training course. She has been working long hours so there is some excuse for still working on it the evening before it was to be presented at a breakfast meeting. However, as she was stressy, tired and ill and I was also was tired (I’ve not been working long hours, just watching too much Heroes catch up) so we started rowing before we even got load it on my laptop. I was keen to show her how the laptop worked, she had better things to do and “you just click a button”. Eventually we did load it - via a USB key as she a) hadn’t bothered to put it on a shared area of the drive and b) had nicked the network cable to copy music onto the PC she’s taking to uni. It didn’t work.

I spent some time showing her how to setup and use the twin head facilities - using the monitor from her uni PC. However, I couldn’t get a preview and slide screen to work in Open Office and as I didn’t have a network cable I couldn’t google. So we gave up on that and ran it on duplicate screens. The animations didn’t work. Mutter, mutter “told you open office was crap” etc. Saved it from Open Office & tried again - no good. Saved it from Power Point as a slide show, still no good. Discussed re-doing it all in Open Office), much muttering, installed Power Point, still no animations. Oh, it’s a old file… So if you’re wondering Open Office does the animations fine and imports them fine just as long as you use a version of the presentation that has them in. (There a couple it doesn’t support I believe but they are best not used anyway.)

Anyway it’s all working so she can do a test run and then to bed - but the uni PC needs turning off and we’ve borrowed the monitor and I’m using it to test Open Office. The power switch will instigate a shut down but that’s not needed as she pulls the mains out anyway. “You just get a blue screen that you ignore”. I’m sure she got an A in ICT A level - what do they teach them?

This morning, 7:30 the phone rings. “Can’t get it to work. Won’t show the slides”. Mutter, mutter “what’s on the projector?” “just blue”. Turns out the projector is so designed as to unplug itself when standing at certain angles “they usually get someone to hold it”. All sorted. 9:30 phone rings, “it didn’t work”. Having set it up they went for breakfast - bad move, the laptop went to sleep and it doesn’t like waking up . Now I come to think about it this happened to me first time I met my latest boss, I just waffled for the several minutes whilst it powered down and back up. The problem being that powering it down while the presentation is open tends to leave it locked / knackered. She had to waffle whilst Rotarians tried to figure out what was happening “This is a very old laptop…”

So, lessons learnt for presentations:

a) Never rely on the technology - some printed thumbnails of the slides / a script would have helped as a backup

b) Don’t piss off the techies - as we nearly weren’t speaking to each other she’d have found it harder to get as far as she did (in this case it would have saved some time and had the same result mind you)

c) Don’t blame the tools - Open Office wasn’t to blame

d) Use things you trust - Open Office wasn’t to blame but because we blamed it we wasted a lot of time

e) It always takes longer than you think to set up

f) Don’t use cheap / old kit off ebay - unless you have to and then make sure you know what you’re doing!

g) Be clear in your requests - “Have we got a laptop I can use for the presentation?” Yes, “Have we got a reliable laptop with Power Point?” Apparently not.