Your presentation software crashes unexpectedly. How will you salvage your graphics-heavy presentation?
When your presentation software crashes, it's crucial to stay calm and quickly pivot to alternative solutions. Here are some strategies to help you salvage your graphics-heavy presentation:
Have other strategies for handling unexpected tech issues? Share your thoughts.
Your presentation software crashes unexpectedly. How will you salvage your graphics-heavy presentation?
When your presentation software crashes, it's crucial to stay calm and quickly pivot to alternative solutions. Here are some strategies to help you salvage your graphics-heavy presentation:
Have other strategies for handling unexpected tech issues? Share your thoughts.
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Be proactive, calm and move wisely. Technical issues happens and it's normal in digital world, so have a backup files help to keep data safe
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In this day and age where anything can happen to the integrity of any software, it is always a wise to have a backup plan. This can come in a form of having it saved as a PDF file and emailing it to yourself or saving it as picture slides on a cloud. Having it readily available on a cloud (via google drive, Microsoft one drive or email) allows you to access the file readily from anywhere on any device. Saving it as an alternate format also helps ensure that if the software (eg. PowerPoint ) is compromised, generic document formats such as PDF or jpegs will still allow you to access them on any OS system- albeit you may lose out on your cool animations in your presentations if you have any.
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I always like to depend on the one most crucial element of the presentation “me”. If all other tech-solutions fails, good rehearsal and presentation skills can still save the day even if you will not be able to have a visual presentation. Because at the end of the day, it is the presenter’s skills that catch the attention and harness engagement with the audience. Visual aid is called “aid” because it only helps but it is not the most crucial part of the presentation. So if the most challenging of situations happened, put a smile on the face and know that you can still rock the boat 😊
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Best not to have this happen. Have your presentation in a digital format that can be viewed from anywhere or at least a backup device you have access to.
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In many cases, presentations are typically done using PowerPoint files. Whatever the format is, to avoid any issues in case of software crashes or technical difficulties, it's a good practice to export your PowerPoint presentation as a PDF and if possible, it's also a good idea to make print copies of the presentation and share them with the audience. This way, they can follow along more easily, and even if technical issues arise, they will still have a physical reference to the material.
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Ensure you have a backup plan. - Ensure it is available on the shared drive so that it can be easily accessed - keep alternatives ready to engage the audience, through links, quick demos or one pagers - simply keep the audience engaged in discussions - Whiteboard may not be available but if yes then best to use them to present the topic in graphical storytelling mode
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This actually happened to me once... I was starting the presentation and my own laptop crashed. I admit that it crossed my mind to run away or to check if there was an eject button. As the door was far away and I could not do any magic trick, i said with my best phone support voice "sorry, we're having technical issues". As the laptop rebooted, I started talking about my presentation. I knew by heart what I needed to say, so, I've tried to describe the best as possible without any visual support. After 5 minutes (the laptop was slow in that day) the slides were back and I simply showed any image that was missing and advanced slightly fast forward to the point I was already speaking at. If it had gotten worse, a white board would be enough.
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Restart the Software Save Temporary Files: Check if the software offers an auto-recovery or temporary save feature. Reopen: Restart the software and check if the presentation was recovered.
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- Always Save Save save save and back up - Have with you atleast two external drives at all times to guarantee that you don’t lose anything important especially offline . - Taking summary notes also helps a lot.
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Backup, backup, backup. Best practice is to always have a version saved at a point where it’s all working good in case the file gets corrupted. And always be mindful of the graphics workload on your machine.