How to present online

Presenting online well comes down to five things: slides that still read in a small window, a camera and microphone set up the day before, sharing the presentation instead of your whole screen, a pace that asks the audience to do something every few minutes, and a link to the deck sent as soon as the call ends. Most online presentations fail on the second and fourth, not on the content.

The difference from a room is that you cannot see the audience drift. In person, a glazed look tells you to move on. On a call, the first sign that you have lost someone is that they never come back from another tab.

Slides for a small window

Assume your slide will be seen in a window smaller than a paperback. People join from laptops with the call grid beside the shared screen, from phones, and from a second monitor they are half watching.

That changes three things. Text has to be larger than for a room, because nobody can walk closer to a video window; the TEDx speaker guide’s rule of 42 point or larger for a stage is a good target here too. Each slide carries one point, because a busy slide cannot be scanned at thumbnail size. And a chart needs its finding written in the title, so the point survives a blurry or frozen frame. The method for that is set out in how to present data in slides.

The W3C’s guidance on accessible presentations adds a habit that pays off on every call: describe the important visual information out loud. Its advice is to cover what is on each slide in what you say, not to read it word for word. Online, that helps the person on a phone on a train as much as someone with low vision.

The customer training deck shows why one job per slide suits a call. Its workflow slide is five short steps that people follow on their own phones as it is shown, and its takeaway slide is headed “photograph this”, which works just as well on a call once you ask people to take a screenshot instead.

Camera, microphone and light

Set these up the day before on the platform you will actually use, not five minutes before the call.

• Camera at eye level. Put the laptop on books so the lens is level with your eyes. A camera looking up at a chin is the most common fault on any call.
• Light in front, not behind. A window behind you turns you into a silhouette. Face the window or put a lamp behind the screen.
• A headset or an external microphone. Audio problems lose an audience faster than video problems, and a laptop microphone picks up the keyboard every time you advance a slide.
• Practise sitting down if you will present sitting down. UNC’s Learning Center advises practising in the stance you will present in, including checking what works for your camera on Zoom.

Share the presentation, not your desktop

Share one window, never the whole screen. A shared desktop shows notifications, other tabs and file names, and every chat preview that pops up is read by the whole call.

The awkward part is the notes. Presentation software wants to fill the screen, and so does the call. Cal State San Marcos’s guide to presenting with Zoom recommends running the slideshow in a window rather than full screen, so you can place other material, including notes, beside it on a single monitor. With two screens, share the slide window and keep the notes on the other display, as close to the camera as you can put them.

Some platforms build this in. Microsoft Teams’ PowerPoint Live shows the presenter the notes beside the slides while the audience sees only the slide, uses significantly less bandwidth than sharing a screen, and lets attendees move back through slides on their own unless the presenter turns on private view. If your deck lives somewhere else, the window sharing approach above does the same job.

Pace and engagement

Slow down by about a third compared with a room. There are no faces to check against, audio lags, and a second language listener has no lip reading to fall back on.

Then build in activity. A prompt every few slides that has a real answer beats “any questions?”. The compliance training deck runs every policy as a rule slide followed by a scenario or a true or false check, which translates directly to a call: put the question up, ask for answers in the chat, count them, then reveal. The customer training deck does the same with a scenario slide that says “pick one, then we will argue about it”.

For anything over an hour, schedule a break and say when it is at the start. Microsoft’s Human Factors Lab measured brain activity associated with stress in people attending four half hour video meetings in a row, and found it building steadily without breaks and holding level when ten minute breaks were added. A ninety minute online session with no pause is working against that.

The customer onboarding deck is a good model for a long call. It shapes a ninety minute kickoff into four parts on its second slide and says that only the third needs a decision from the customer that day, so nobody is surprised when their turn comes.

Questions on a call

Questions work differently online because nobody can catch your eye. Tell people at the start how to ask: in the chat at any time, or out loud at set points. Then keep a colleague on the chat if you can, so questions are collected while you talk and read out at the next pause.

Answer the question in the chat as well as out loud when it is short, because half the call will have been looking at something else when it was asked. Repeat every spoken question before answering it, since remote microphones are uneven and the question may only have been heard by you.

Close with a slide that stays on screen during questions. The customer training deck ends with six real questions from earlier sessions as prompts, which is the quickest way to restart a silent call.

Common mistakes

The table under this article is the full checklist. These are the mistakes it exists to prevent:

• Presenting from the editor. The audience sees your slide rail, your cursor and every mis-click.
• Reading notes from a screen far from the camera. It looks like you are talking to somebody else in the room.
• Leaving questions to the end. On a call, a silent room at minute forty is hard to restart. Ask early.
• Sending an attachment afterwards. Three versions circulate by the end of the week.
• Not describing charts. Somebody on a phone saw a grey rectangle.

Build it

A deck in the builder presents full screen in the browser, which you can share as a single window. F toggles full screen, the arrow keys, Space, Page Down or j move forward, and N shows your notes. The notes can pop out into their own browser window titled Speaker notes, carrying the note and the slide number out of the total, so on a call you can place that window under your camera and share only the slides.

After the call, send the deck as a link. Each deck has one read only share link that always shows the current saved version, so a fix you save after the call reaches everyone who opens it. Two things to know before you send it: anyone with the link can press N and read your speaker notes, and the only way to stop a link working is to disable the deck. Speaker notes explained covers what belongs in notes you are happy to share. The share link page sets out those limits in full, and the guide to sharing a presentation with a link shows the steps.