The scene: you’re nervous, standing at the front of the room, dozens, maybe hundreds of eyes on you. Some may even be deciding your fate at the company.
You’re giving a demo and it’s going smoothly so far. You get to the typing portion and Bam! your nervous fingers can’t type a single thing correctly.
We are big fans of live demos. They are more interesting than just reading off of slides, which your schoolteacher can tell you.
Even with practice, your fingers may fumble under the pressure. Flubbing a few spoken words are may be ignorable, but misspelling a typed command needed to make something happen can stall the presentation, not so much fun for the audience.
Our suggestion: minimize the amount you have to type, let TextExpander do that heavy lifting for you. Type out what you need for the demo, put those text chunks into TextExpander and assign each an abbreviation you can type instead. Once you’re in the demo, type these short abbreviations which will expand into your text “snippets.” This will keep you both more accurate and more efficient.
Maybe you need some autocorrect to help you. TextExpander offers autocorrect dictionaries which you can expand in any app.
Maybe you’ll be battling autocorrect the whole way, in which case put it on your checklist to turn it off before the presentation.
Speaking of which, have a checklist of what you need for the demo. It can include things like:
- bring water
- prepare TextExpander snippets
- clear off your desktop of everything but the files needed in the demo
- turn on Do Not Disturb so the audience doesn’t get distracted when your mom emails you
And, as your mother probably just emailed to tell you, practice makes perfect.
