Creating your Conference Presentation
Please plan on speaking to a technically sophisticated audience. O'Reilly is known for providing deep technical background, and as such we tend to attract intermediate and advanced programmers and very few beginners. In this document, you will find:
- About Presentation Content
- Designing Presentation Slides (including templates)
For other information for speakers, see the Speaker Registration Page.
Dos and Don'ts About Presentation Content
O'Reilly Conferences attract primarily serious and experienced programmers, developers, technical staff and webmasters. Our experience has shown that the following guidelines can help you deliver a successful presentation to this demanding audience.
Do:
- Focus on your subject. Attendees will expect to go away from your presentation having learned something new and helpful. If you feel the topic you've taken on is too broad to be covered well in the time allotted, talk to us. We can help you hone in on a portion of the subject that can be discussed thoroughly in the given time frame. It is better for you and for your audience to cover less material in greater depth than to provide a broad-brush overview of a subject.
- Assume your audience is experienced and sophisticated, but not that they are expert in the subject that you are discussing. Limit background material to the essentials for understanding your presentation. It is fair and useful to state what you assume your audience already knows early in your presentation.
- Allow enough time at the end of your presentation for questions and answers. Attendees at technical conferences repeatedly report that they often derive as much benefit from the Q&A portions of the sessions as from the presentations themselves. As a guideline, presenters should allow for 10 minutes of Q&A per hour of presentation.
- Use real-world scenarios and speak from your personal experience, with specific applications of the technology. Your audience will better retain the information you present if it is anchored by examples from the real world.
Don't:
- Make blatant product presentations or pitches. Attendees don't like it, it doesn't do your product any good, and it damages the conference's reputation. If you feel it necessary, you can mention your product briefly either in the context of defining your credentials or as an example of a category of products that is germane to your topic. Please don't go beyond that. This also applies to books. Presenters who violate this guideline will not be invited to return.
- Simply read your slides. You'd be surprised how many speakers get up in front of a group, display their first slide and essentially read its contents to the audience, then go to the next slide and do the same. If your slides have your entire talk on them, they might be too busy in the first place.
- Allow your presentation to run longer than the time slot that you have been allocated. Rehearse your presentation and make sure that it fits the time slot and allows ample Q&A time.
Designing Your Presentation Slides
Your presentation will be projected on a large screen and viewed by your audience from a distance. We have created templates that you can download and use for your presentation:
- PowerPoint Presentation (.zip file)
- HTML Presentation (.zip file)
Open Office can open PowerPoint Presentations — please download the PowerPoint presentation template for use with Open Office.
The "Title Master" slide has a background of a sidebar with the conference logo. Edit the title of your presentation and your personal info on the actual slide.
Edit the presenter information on the "Slide Master." In PowerPoint, go to the View menu->Master->Slide Master. Edits you make here will appear on every slide in your presentation. If, for some reason, you wish to delete the presenter information on an individual slide, you can go into the Format menu on that slide, select Background, and check the box "Omit background Graphics from master."
Important Note About Printing PowerPoint Presentations: If you want any color background graphics to print, you must make sure that the "black and white" or "grayscale" options are not checked in the print dialog box.
If you have questions or feedback about the templates, email
Here some guidelines we have found to ensure that everyone gets the most out of your presentation at the conference.
Do:
Create a cover slide that includes the following (or use our template above):
- Session title
- Your name, title, and company
- Your email address
- Name of the event and where you are presenting
- If you are not using our templates, be sure to use high contrast background and type colors.
- Use easy-to-read sans-serif fonts.
- Provide a slide number on each slide.
Don't:
- Use reversed-out type (e.g., white type on a dark background).
- Use colors that clash or create optical effects (e.g. red type on a turquoise background), or busy or blurry graphic backgrounds.
If you are interested in how to create effective presentation slides, you may enjoy Edward Tufte's The Cognitive Style of PowerPoint.
If you have any questions about being a speaker at our conference, please contact Vee McMillen by email ( or phone: (707) 827-7202.