The most important thing about giving a finance presentation is having something interesting to say. If you don’t have some insight about your data then you might as well send the data in an email. If you do have something interesting to say then the first step is to write a script. Note that I mean you have to WRITE your whole presentation, not just outline a few thoughts as bullet points on slides and hope you can think of something good to say when the bullets flash up on the screen.

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Here are 5 tips to make your next presentation better.

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I am old enough to have worked in an office where reports, letters and memos were handwritten and sent to a typing pool to be typed. Typists were trained to leave two spaces after a full stop (period). This was because typewriters use monospaced fonts — they have to because the reel has to move the same distance after each letter is typed. Two spaces after the full stop helped with the readability of the document.

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After you’ve written a document in Word do you find the text does not look right? Are there unexpected line breaks or extra-wide spaces between some words? The way to fix this is to show the invisible characters in your document. You do this by clicking the button that has a backwards P on it (the symbol is called a pilcrow). Having switched it on you will see blue dots for each space character, and symbols showing the tabbed-spaces, line returns, paragraph breaks, page and section breaks and table cells.

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There are authors who write their books by hand. With a pen or pencil. Until the industrial age this was the only way Writing by hand can help with creativity and maybe there are times when you would benefit from this. Many, many years ago I wrote a novel. The first draft was written by hand. Typing it into my computer was the first stage of editing: not every word or sentence made it into the computer file.

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