Giving presentations is an important element of any IT professional's career - but most would rather be writing code or doing project plans. As a solution, Paul Glen has put together a list of ideas to help you screw up your next presentation - so you'll never have to do one again. Glen put this list together as a preview to an upcoming hands-on training course for presentations that will be put on by C2 Consulting, Hill Enterprises and Lee Inc. Included in his list of tips are "just wing it" and both start out and finish weak. Also included is "abandon your objective."

Coherence and focus are overrated. Your audience doesn't really care if you start out with one presentation purpose and seamlessly transition to another one. As long as you smoothly transition from one objective to the next to the next, the audience will follow along. If you do not clearly move from one to the next, you're actually doing #6, meandering.

Another helpful hint is to "declare your own time zone."

Just start when you start and finish when you finish. Once you've got the microphone, you are in control of the audience's time. Whatever schedule they set is irrelevant. Possession of the microphone gives you the right to dictate the time allocation of your audience.

Any other tips and tricks to contribute to Glen's list? What has been your worst presentation experience - either on the giving or receiving end of things?

I really like FreeMind (freemind.sourceforge.net) and similar tools (have tried MindMapper demo too) for laying out mind maps of information. Personally, I have no trouble following a good mind map, but some people don't like the format, especially for presentation. I gave an internal talk on new features in Java 5 at the beginning of the year and my boss really disliked the mind map format, which I decided to use in a presentation just to try something different. Managers like PPT, period. Anyway, it was an interesting experiment. Most of the dev team was interested in the tool after seeing my presentation.

Check out Presentation Zen for similar stuff

>Any other tips and tricks to contribute to Glen's list? What has been your worst presentation experience - either on the giving or receiving end of things?

Wow let's ignore the discussion point and spam the thread with links to our favourite tools. Please can we have an off-topic button.

Between yours and the previous Ethan Allen reply to jwic I've actually found myself laughing (in a good way) when reading these threads. Keep up the good work :)

Happy to oblidge :-)

1. Don't hesitate to get technical. The Chief Financial Officer sitting in the second row loves it when you start talking about garbage collection cycles, heap sizes and contiguous memory allocation. He knows exactly what you're talking about. Go for it: impress him with your technical ability. 2. If anyone in the audience claims they don't understand what you're talking about, they're either stupid or lying. Either way it's their fault. Don't hesitate to use sarcasm on any member of the audience that asks for an explanation. It can't possibly be your fault, can it? You understand it so everyone else must understand it too. 3. If it seems that anyone in the audience still isn't quite getting it, and still doesn't understand what you're trying to say, just keep repeating the same thing over and over. Sooner or later it will get through. It's a well known truth of education: if you repeat something enough times, evetnually everyone will understand.

Funny, One of my collegues presented also a set of issues on his blog. Check out the following: How to unpresent your case at http://agilejava.blogspot.com Kind regards, Yuri Vrancken.

To give a real bad presentation use Powerpoint (or similar tools) exclusively. http://www.kunstbilder-galerie.de