Monday, June 29, 2009

Useful Speakers Notes for Presentations

If you've done much presenting using Microsoft Power Point, you know how much work is involved in writing "good" speaker notes to augment the content of your slides. While slides needs to be brief in their content and are meant to convey the essence of a point, the speaker's notes provide you with the ability to expand on the details that you actually discuss with your audience.

In my job I do lots of presentations and have found a great solution for capturing the speakers notes and at the same time giving myself a chance to rehearse "out loud" my talking points for a specific slide. I use Dragon Naturally Speaking 10 to capture my discussion for each slide in the "speaker notes" field for the each slide.

I bring up the slides, put my headset on and capture my presentation for each slide. I don't worry about any corrections as I present, rather I focus on the flow of the presentation and how it sounds.

After presenting each slide, I can quickly edit out any minor issues with the captured text and have a great set of detailed notes for my audience and a chance rehearse and see if there are any refinements I should make to the content.