iPad with its stunning resolution seemed like an obvious candidate for making business presentation but is it a good tool in all circumstances? Also what else do you need to make it into a great tool? The answers to these questions are provided based on my personal experience. Please share your experiences!
On a broad level, presentations can be split into three main categories
- 1-on-1 presentations
- 1-to-many presentations
- Remote presentations
In this blog, we discuss the first two of these situations and provide tools and tips and evaluate iPad usefulness as a tool for making business presentation.
1-on-1 presentations
iPad is probably the best tool here – way better than laptop since that barrier of screen is removed as you can see in the picture below. For this category let us assume any situation where one can sit across the table with couple of people. For this purpose no screen projection tools are needed and iPad by itself is sufficient. However, you need to make sure your presentation is readily available not just in an online but also in an offline mode. Even though there are many tools on iPads to create presentations, the best approach still is to create presentation on your computer and then transfer it to iPad. Also avoid animations as they don’t transfer well on iPad.
Transferring your presentation from computer to iPad – There are three broad choices here
- Email to yourself – inefficient and cumbersome
- Putting it in a cloud like Dropbox and then saving it on iPad – inefficient and cumbersome but slight improvement over the first one
- Use a tool like DocSync.Net from iTunes and just select the file from your computer or cloud and it is automatically available on your iPad as shown on the picture on the right above.
1-to-many presentations
Your laptop is still a better tool for these situations than an iPad. Why? It is assumed that you definitely need to connect your output to an external monitor or projector. Needless to say that kind of connectivity is readily available from most laptops but for the iPad, you need to buy another connector from Apple or a third party. These connectors are available with VGA or HDMI options. We had a chance to hook our iPad to a projector and found some issues.
If you own an iPad1, probably none of these connectors will work as was my experience of having tried two of these. However, if you have the new shining iPad3 that Apple calls “The new iPad”, there are no issues but HDMI is preferred if you have an HDMI enabled projector or monitor. With our iPad2, I had the most consistent connectivity with VGA connectors. If you tend to move a lot while making presentations, the wire mess can also cause issues. I just wish there are more Airplay type projectors available in corporate environments.
Conclusion
For 1-to-many presentations, laptop is still a better tool but if you must use iPad to project, you will have the best options with iPad3. For 1-to-1 presentations, iPad is the best presentation device. However, you need to make sure your presentations created on computer are accessible. Of the three options of using Email or putting in the cloud and then transferring to iPad or just using DocSync.Net app to get your application on iPad, the later seems to be the best and most efficient alternative.
