ColdFusion & PDF: Improving your Workflow is my topic for CFunited 2009

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At ColdFusionCamp in Munich last week I tried something new. Actually, I tried two new things.

• I presented my "ColdFusion and PDF: Improving Your Workflow" talk for the first time
  
• My slides were bullet point free
  

Bullet point free slides aren't a new thing, and to be honest my inspiration came from a book by Garr Reynolds "PresentationZen". It's a great book and really opens your eyes and mind to what is so wrong about the way 99% of presentations are given. 

The book was really the last push I needed to change my style. It's something I've been unhappy with for sometime to be honest. Although I like to think I'm a dynamic, and hopefully entertaining presenter, no matter how much fluff I add, I've effectively just been reading off the screen. And that sucks. For me, and for my audience.

I know just how many times I've attended presentation and fallen asleep after 10 minutes. It's (generally) nothing to do with the speakers knowledge. It's the delivery process. Reading bullet point after bullet point. Actually, another issue that results in your audience falling asleep is if you have the lights off. Always make sure the lights are on. Dim the lights near the projection screen if necessary, but a dark room just makes everyone tired.

Now, don't get me wrong, there are definitely presentations where bullet points are required. There's no way around it, but for the vast majority it's really not required.

So, for ColdFusionCamp my approach, which was of course heavily influenced by what I read in "PresentationZen", was to ditch the bullet points. The new approach was to have every slide represented by an image. An image that told a story.

There's a lot of pros to this approach and a few cons. The primary con is that without the aid of text you REALLY need to know your material. However, the primary con is also the most important pro. By really knowing your material you don't need any text. 

My presentation consisted of 7 slides, each telling their part of our story; how to use ColdFusion and PDF to improve workflow before moving onto a demonstration and then a walk through of the important code (of which there is very little because the CFPDFFORM tag really does it all for us).

The feedback I've received so far from my talk has been overwhelmingly positive. 

• The speaker really knew his material
  
• The slides were visually appealing 
  
• The speaker, his slides and his material were entertaining, funny and informatiive
  
• I love the fact your cat is called Frodo Baggins (you had to be there!)
  

As well as the new presentation delivery, I also took the approach of giving away goodies as part of the presentation. Ultimately if someone from the audience asked a question, or answered one of mine, they got a prize.

There's nothing worse than giving a presentation to an audience who are static, or maybe just too shy to get involved. For me, I like my audience to participate and because as a speaker I can't guarantee they will be, I cheat by offering to give them something if they do.

The Munich audience were VERY interactive with lots of questions, and discussions and ultimately I ran out of things to give away. I even met up with two people from the crowd the next day to continue discussing the topic of ColdFusion and PDF.

Overall I'm extremely pleased with how things went in Munich, even if my laptop did try to ruin everything. ALWAYS have a backup of the material you need. If I didn't have that, my talk would never have happened. I don't know if I'll bring this presentation to the US in 2009, but I'm definitely planning on speaking at cf.Objective() and hopefully CFUnited... and of course Scotch on the Road.