improved presentation

Guy and I chatted today.

I asked about how the Wednesday RASC meeting had gone. He said the hand outs I prepared were well-received (although they printed too many). Better that then not enough... Cost of doing business.

I was very pleased to learned that in fact he had used my new presentation file (with the left-justification, consistent style, reduced font size, etc.). Just not the latest-latest version! The one I had worked on Wednesday morning and sent to Charles. The one with the great graphics. That I had told everyone Charles had! That Charles went to the trouble of downloading and copying to a USB key drive. And taking (with the hand outs) to the meeting. Oh well...

Looking forward, I asked if he wanted to work with me on the new presentation file to make further improvements. It was a productive session with a bit of training / coaching too. Lots of good changes. All tolled:

• repaired text containers: so to permit easy extraction of text for handouts; looks like people have deleted some in the past and added free floating text boxes in their places
  
• reduced font size, both title and body text: so to be less overpowering on the large 15x20 screen, and to let us fit a wee bit more text on (hopefully people won't abuse that)
• made dates consistent: Guy suggested Metric format; I suggested civilian time
• applied various grammatical changes as directed by Master Guy-san
  
• broke up long text slides into separate smaller ones: also allows us to fit in an image
  
• added general notes in a hidden slide and specific notes to certain slides: to hopefully assist users in future, keep things consistent
• added notes for making handouts!
• added my contact information!
• added nearest city to Dark Sky Observing Session slide
  
• added graphics, images, photos of presenters: to make the presentation more visually interesting
• made a better map to Granite: the existing one was pulled from their site; confusing
• noted free parking at Granite
• noted we sit at the back in the Granite
• apply a consistent transition between the slides
  
• changed bullet symbols: used some astronomy-themed ones like stars...
• added pure black slide at end: for an elegant fade-to-black finish
  

I took the reins, finished off the presentation, and then shipped it out to some of the councillors for review.

Meanwhile, Guy sent over some images for review. I'm searching for a high resolution image to replace the current background image.