- Understand Your Paper Requirements
- Transparency Film, Anyone?
- Use Local Employment Resources
- Anticipate Differences in the Tools Available to You
- Bring a Zip Drive
- Have a Work Procedure in Place
- Summary
Anticipate Differences in the Tools Available to You
If you plan to rent local equipment such as computers and printers for PowerPoint production, make arrangements ahead of time with an equipment rental company. You can usually contact the concierge or business center at the hotel you're staying in to assist you.
Determine your requirements ahead of time, and anticipate differences in the actual equipment you'll receive. For instance, even if you asked for a computer running Windows XP with Office XP installed, you may end up with Windows 98 and Office 97. The reality is that things like this happen.
Here are some key issues to consider:
You can't always control the version of Windows and PowerPoint you actually receive on a rental computer. Bring along your own version of PowerPoint, just in case.
If the original PowerPoint files were created in PowerPoint XP (2002), and rental computers don't have that version, avoid incompatibility issues by saving down a version before packing up files for off-site production.
If you are renting computers in an international location, it will be tough to find computers with an English version system. Chances are, computer systems are in the native country language. Make sure you know Windows and PowerPoint menus really well!
What you see is not always what you get. If you have a particular color printer at the home office, and rent a different type of color printer at an off-site location, the colors may not look exactly the same on color-printed hard copy.
If you are renting a color printer, extra color cartridges are a must to avoid running out of color at the eleventh hour.