Think about the structure of your presentation. You need to clearly define the message that you want to spread. Be inspired and focus on the content rather than on the technical capabilities of Keynote software; take your time to elaborate the content and information to be presented. Less is more and over-designing your presentation is your worst enemy. The aim of every successful message delivery is to be clear and easy to follow, so keep that in mind when designing both the story to tell and the slides to show.

Find out about the set-up of your presenting area, the size of the screen, the quality of the projector, support for MacBook computers as well as video and audio outputs available. Don’t wait until a few seconds before your presentation. Always bring your own pointer and adapters for your computer to avoid at least this kind of surprise. Have your charger with you, too.

It is mandatory to ask for the size and the proportion of the screen provided at the stage. This is called the “presentation ratio”. The default it is 16:9, and at bigger events with better projectors it sometimes is 3:1. It is useful to know this in advance because changing the ratio of an already existing presentation is time consuming and stressful.

These features can be found in the top right corner of the screen under Document. You can check which presentation ratio is selected and can switch to the desired one. Switching to 3:1 will be accomplished following the steps: Document - Slide Size - Custom Slide Size – 1500 x 500 (Fig. 1).