If you are making a presentation to an audience, you can draw on the same set of techniques used in effective oral presentations, including maintaining eye contact, varying the pitch of your voice, speaking loudly enough to be heard clearly, and slowing down so that your audience can follow your argument. In addition, make sure that you can advance your slides easily — either by using a slide clicker, which is similar to a computer mouse, or by standing close enough to your computer or tablet to advance the slides manually — and that you are facing your audience. In case your equipment fails — for instance, if a laptop loses power or an LCD display fails to work properly — be sure that you have a backup plan. You could bring printouts of your presentation, for example, or create a handout summarizing your points.

If your presentation will be viewed in digital format, make sure that you’ve removed any notes that you don’t want your audience to see; ensure that the format in which you’ve saved the file can be read on a wide range of computers, tablets, and smartphones; and choose a means of distributing the file. You can distribute a file by placing it on a Web site, uploading it to a blog or social-networking site, attaching it to an e-mail message, sharing it through a service such as DropBox, or saving it on a flash drive and giving it to people you want to view it. If you’ve uploaded the file, open it and check its appearance. If necessary, revise the presentation, save it to a new file, and replace the file you uploaded. Do the same with files that you plan to attach to e-mail or put on a flash drive.