Best Practices for Presenting on an iPad
Thursday, April 21, 2011 at 9:07AM Last week at ABA TECHSHOW, I discovered a limitation of the iPad while leading a session on the iPad for Lawyers: although the VGA adapter I used to connect my iPad to the projector worked great, I found that not all of my apps displayed onscreen. I'm still trying to figure out how to deal with that (any ideas from the iPad community?), but in the meantime, I thought I'd share some tips on a related issue: presenting on the iPad.
I really liked this article on Indezine titled Presenting on an iPad: Conversation with Jamie Garroch, and agree with Jamie's conclusion that Keynote is currently the best way to present on the iPad (although I'm intrigued by the new Prezi app, and intend to try it out soon). You can always convert your PowerPoint file to PDF and present in GoodReader or some other reading app, or you can convert to video or images as well. But Keynote remains the best option, because of its capabilities. You can convert your .PPT or .PPTX files to Keynote format - there will be a little bit of modification in your file, but in all it works pretty well.
That said, there are still some limitations to be aware of when presenting on Keynote, which I take from the interview with Jamie:
- The iPad only supports a small set of fonts - so if you like to use funky fonts in your presentations, you're going to be out of luck.
- Don't use video, unless you are able to convert between the WMV (Windows) and MOV (Apple) formats.
- If you like to hyperlink to documents or other items, you're also out of luck - Keynote only supports links to web pages.
- Don't plan on using too many graphical effects, because most of them won't transfer to Keynote, unless you paste the object back into the slide as an image.
- Stick to simple animations, or wait until your presentation is in Keynote before adding them. I'm starting to use less animations in my presentations lately, so that's not a big deal for me.
- Keep in mind that the iPad has a 4:3 aspect ratio, so if you create your slide deck in another setup you may find your images squashed up when you convert to Keynote.
Using the iPad as a presentation device is really intriguing to me right now - it pulls you out from behind a laptop (unless you use a remote), and makes your presentation more of a conversation, I think. Just keep these tips in mind when designing your slide deck.
keynote, presentations in Apps, Productivity 
Reader Comments (5)
Prezi is GREAT. We have started using it for all our presentations. You must first create them on a Desktop, its much easier. The only thing I've found is that if you have video embedded some don't come over well. Other than that we love it and so does our audience!
How much memory is really needed for the ipad 2 to function effectively for a working lawyer? 16 vs. 32 vs. 64?
I think it depends on what you're going to use it for - if you want the ability to carry lots of videos (depositions, animations, etc.), then you'll want to pick one of the larger drives - 32GB at least, and 64GB recommended. If you intend to put music on it, I'd say get a larger one as well. But if you're going to use cloud services like Box.net or Dropbox that keep your documents for you, then you can probably get away with a smaller iPad. And if all you plan on using it for is carrying, creating and editing small documents, you can probably make do with the 16GB.
You'll also want to consider whether you'll be downloading lots of apps to the iPad. Some programs can be pretty big, but a lot of those are games. The more apps, the more space. Right now I have a total of 147 apps on my iPad, and it takes up 9GB - and only a few of them are the big games. I purchased the 64GB version, and I still have about 40GB free - most of my space right now is taken up with apps and exercise videos (for working out while traveling). The other content currently takes up very little space - around 620MB.
Thanks for this very helpful post.
The thing I hated most about doing a presentation on the iPad was being tethered to the projector. But for 99 cents you can get the app "Keynote Remote," which lets you tether the iPad and then use your iPhone as the remote to advance the slides. The iPad and iPhone talk to each other thru either wifi or Bluetooth. Now that Keynote runs on the iPhone, you can also to do the reverse - tether the iPhone and use the iPad as the remote. I've tried the app to make sure the wifi and Bluetooth connections work, and they do, although I don't know how far apart the iPhone and iPad can be with Bluetooth.
I used the Keynote Remote for the first time two weeks ago, and it was amazing. Even better, the newly updated version will let you view the upcoming slide from your phone.