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The iPad is an excellent presentation tool. It’s light, portable, and clearly made for eye-catching visuals. Here are some tips for ensuring your presentations look their best when viewed on an iPad.
Things to consider before creating your presentation
Ensure your presentation venue is ideal for the iPad.
If you’re giving a talk in a small conference or lecture-style room, you can hook your iPad to a projector. However, you will not be able to use a remote control with your iPad, so you will have to be sitting nearby to tap the screen.
Not planning on using a projector? You can also show clients your presentation straight from the device. However, with the iPad’s screen size, you will need to be seated close to your client. While this setup limits your presentation environment, it also allows you to present in an engaging and conversational manner.
Once you’ve determined that the iPad is something you can use for your presentation, you can then create your presentation.
Things to consider when creating your presentation
Presentation Size
When designing your presentation, set the size to 1024×768, the same as the iPad, to avoid any viewer compatibility issues.
Your presentation tool of choice
Creating presentations for the iPad is easy if you’re a Mac user and use Keynote to create your slideshows and presentations.
However, if your desktop computer uses Microsoft tools, bear in mind that PowerPoint is not supported by iPad.
Fortunately, there are solutions to ensure your presentation can still be viewed on an iPad:
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Turn your presentation into a video
To preserve the animation, transitions, audios, and video clips within your PowerPoint slides, there are PowerPoint-to-video converters that allow you to convert PowerPoint presentations to iPad supported video formats: .m4v, .mp4, and .mov. (Here’s one that’s free, and you’ll find many more to chose from.)
You can also use screen-capturing software (such as Snagit) to convert your PowerPoint presentation into video.
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Convert your slides into pictures
If your presentation is made up mostly charts, tables, or photos, this is a great solution for you, since iPad is equipped with a slideshow photo viewer.
Unfortunately, animations, transitions, and sound and video clips will not be preserved when you convert your presentation to pictures. In that case, stick to using video.
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Save it as a PDF file
If you have a newer version of PowerPoint (2007 and 2010), you can create a PDF copy of your slides. The iPad supports PDF files, so this works best if your presentation is mostly graphic content.
Again, this method of conversion is not without its disadvantages. If your presentation has many animations, audios and video, these will not be retained once your PPT file is saved as PDF.
