How to come off as exceedingly stupid when using Powerpoint in a presentation — a modest guide

The best way to look entirely stupid is to present your slides from the editing view (i.e., never enter presentation mode). It helps if you find out you don’t know how to advance slides in this mode because the last time you gave a talk, your aide switched into presentation mode for you and this made some more key combinations work that now mysteriously don’t.

Alternatively, you can entertain the audience by fumbling around for a while finding the tiny button that starts presentation mode. Of course, you are way too important to remember that F5 (Ctrl-Shift-S on the Mac) starts a presentation… (Only people who don’t know the pleasures of coming over stupid go to the podium with the slides already loaded and — heaven forbid — the presentation mode alreay active.) Oh, and do the inverse at the end, while blocking the podium so the next speaker can’t set up their laptop.

In any case, it is important that the audience sees the edit mode of Powerpoint, together with an impressive view of other applications running on your laptop (occasional IM message popups included) while you do the Q&A session at the end; so make sure you advance beyond the last (black) slide.

One of the most powerful ways to look stupid is to boot the laptop in front of the audience and show all the startup screens. Mumbling something about “bad Linux graphics device drivers” helps to replace a possible impression of thoughtlessness by the impression of incompetence. Even if you can’t do this (e.g., if it would impinge on your time slot too much), make sure Powerpoint is not started when you connect the VGA, that you have a really annoying desktop background and that it takes ages to find Powerpoint and/or your presentation in the maze of twisty little directories that your laptop is.

On a Mac, Apple and Microsoft already conspire to make sure you look stupid, so no action is needed on your part. Apple knows you don’t know that you will be presenting on a projector, so the sequence of events is as follows:

• You connect the projector to the Mac.
• There is an unexplicable multi-second pause while strange image-shifting, blue screens, and some form of alignment happens.
• The highly scientific data exchange process between the projector and the Mac about the projector’s properties gets you the wrong resolution. The menu bar “Displays” menu does not show the correct resolution either, so you open Display preferences to fix it. Of course, the screen you now have to look at to click the right resolution is the projector, so you have to bend over backwards while making this selection.
• There is another unexplicable pause with random blue things happening on the projector while the Mac adjusts to the correct resolution (which it will forget immediately after disconnecting, so you have to repeat all this if you give a second talk).
• Now you are almost set to start your presentation. Even if you know that this would be a simple press of Ctrl-Shift-S, you’d better be careful. Apple and Microsoft have worked together to ensure the default is that the slides are shown on your laptop screen, but the audience sees the “presenter’s view” with a time clock, an overview over the slides plus your presenter notes. So, instead of starting your presentation, you go into the “Slide Show” menu, select “Setup Show” (all with the mouse as there are no shortcuts), select “Screen” to open another pane and then click the projector as the presentation device (of course, this can’t be the default because then you would never learn the pleasures of performing precise mouse movements while blinded by stage lighting). Close the various panes.
• Finally, you can Ctrl-Shift-S and start talking.
• (Of course, the relative position of the two screens in mouse pointer space is random, so while starting to talk you are distracted by having to check all four corners of the screen while moving the pointer to the right space.)

Compare this to the clearly inferior Microsoft user experience where you configure the external display to 1024x768, start presentation mode while still off-stage, go to the podium, just plug in and start talking.

The little procedures given here are really all you have to do to give a lasting first impression — nauseating transitions, 8-point type, black type on dark blue background, and holding microphones designed for clip-on use in front of your mouth (to maximize the “pop” effect on plosives) only add to the experience.