1. A presentation isn't an art gallery. You don't need 16 trillion colors and you don't need 25 gigapixels. If you're lucky, the data projector will do 1280x1024 and 65536 colors. A 640x480 256 color picture probably looks just as good. Don't forget to scale down your pictures with an external tool before you put it into powerpoint or whatever you're using.
2. A presentation isn't there to amuse people with the background. Your audience has brains that don't need constant stimulation by a goofy background image. Fancy backgrounds are pointless and belong on your desktop. Sure, they look nice on your montitor. They might resemble something when displayed by a data projector. If you're lucky, it'll look obscene and keep your audience interested while you drone on.
3. A presentation isn't a music video. Skip the shiny animations and the music and sounds unless they're key to the presentation. Or you need something to fill your time. If you need something to keep the audience awake, make sure the noises are different each time. Consider using SimRonan sound clips.
4. A presentation isn't a flip book. Don't try to display 120 slides in 15 minutes.
5. A presentation isn't about software advocay. No one cares what software you used to write your presntation. They just want you to present the material. So as much as PDFs suck, consider exporting your presentation to PDF and using that. PDF viewers are easier to find (and tend to work better) than viewers for that spiffy presentation tool you like to use.
6. A presentation isn't a font demo. Pick a couple and stop there. If you're not using your computer, chances are they don't have your ugly fonts anyways. Besides, if you were so good with fonts, you wouldn't be making this presentation. You'd be working with fonts.

-- BenKorvemaker - 30 Mar 2005