In general, it is always better to run a PowerPoint presentation off of your own laptop computer. You are familiar with the size, shape, key location and eccentricities of your own keyboard, so this reduces the chances of blunders during your presentation.
But there is one danger to using your own computer during a speech or training session: your own email. If, for example, you were checking your own email before you began your presentation and you didn’t close the program, your email could pop up at an inopportune moment. Let’s say you have finished your presentation and you are closing your file in order to let someone else use your computer for another presentation. If your email program is open under your presentation, your email will now be visible to everyone in the room if the projector is still on. This opens you up to all sorts of embarrassments.
I had finished my PowerPoint presentation at the beginning of a training one day and was closing my file to make room for one of my trainee’s presentations. I had accidentally left my email program up. Unknown to me, new SPAM email had come to my inbox. And no, it wasn’t the typical Viagra ad. This SPAM had a subject heading consisting of a racial epithet. It was the N-word! And it was now flashed up on a giant screen in front of the whole room via the LCD projector.
Fortunately, the offensive email caught my eye in a second and I quickly put a note pad over the projector to prevent any image from being projected. But this was a call too close for comfort. The worst case scenario is that someone could see the email and conclude that I am an unreconstructed racist. The second nasty option is that audience members could see it and start laughing about what an embarrassing blunder I had made.
Either way, it was a distraction I would not have wanted. (The last thing you want as a speaker is to have your confidence shattered because you are worried that you embarrassed yourself) I want my audience focused on my message, not my blunders. Now I make sure to keep my email program closed at all times if my computer is attached to an LCD projector.
Originally published as E-mail Security: Avoiding Humiliation by TJ Walker for SpeakingChannel.TV
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