Palais des congrès de Montréal « 201 Viger Avenue West « Montréal, Québec, Canada

Please observe these basic rules:

• Each slide should illustrate a single point or idea.
• Use large, legible letters.
• Do not crowd the slide.
• Message slides should contain no more than 7 lines, with 7 or fewer words per line.

• Keep the data on slides simple. If you have a great deal of data, divide it among several slides. The content of a single slide should be easily comprehended in 20 seconds. Remember: seven lines per slide and seven words per line!
• Use large, legible letters.
• If your data slides are in color, use only light colors, such as white and yellow, on a dark background, such as dark blue. Do not use colors such as red or purple.
• Keep slides of radiographs light. Dense or dark slides project poorly in large rooms. Enlarging the significant areas and using arrows to point out the specific area or lesion often helps.
• Patient confidentiality must be protected, and the patient's a right to privacy should not be infringed without express informed consent. This includes removing identifying text in images, providing graphical overlays onto photographs, etc. No names should appear on the images.
• Avoid commercial reference unless mandatory. A logo or institutional identification should appear only on the first title slide. Do not use such identification as a header on each slide.
• Limit the number of slides to no more than one (1) for each minute of your presentation. The slides should not contain your entire presentation. Their purpose is to support your talk and to emphasize the important points.

• Title of text slides should contain five or fewer words.
• Spaces between lines should be at least the height of an upper case letter.

• Use graphs rather than tables if possible.
• Keep tabular slides as brief as possible.
• Two or more simple slides are better than one complicated slide.
• Do not crowd the slide.
• Make the font as large as possible.

• Keep graphs simple.
• Round off figures.
• Limit the number of captions.
• Use line graphs to show trends or changing relationships.
• Use bar graphs to compare volumes.

• Simplify charts to keep them legible.
• Break up complex charts into a series of slides.

Graphics

When importing or inserting any graphic file (picture) it is important to make sure that it will function on any computer and does not require proprietary software to view. The acceptable formats are as follows:

Bitmap (BMP), GIF, JPEG (JPG), Portable Network Graphic (PNG), and TIFF (TIF).

While Microsoft PowerPoint may allow other formats to be imported, compatibility cannot be guaranteed.

Macintosh users who use a PC for presentation should follow the above guidelines as well. While Apple Operating Systems and Microsoft Office for Macintosh allow PICT files to be imported, they often fail to function when viewed on the PC.

Lastly, computer displays and projectors generally display at 72 to 100 dots per inch (DPI). Graphic files should be adjusted to these parameters. Since many scanners use resolutions of 300 DPI or greater, a program such as Adobe Photoshop ® can be used to reduce the DPI to the 72 to 100 range. This is done before importing the picture into PowerPoint. Failure to reduce graphic files creates large PowerPoint files with superfluous data.

Videos
It is especially critical that any presentation that uses videos be loaded at least 24 hours in advance. Video files are not embedded, so a copy of the actual file must be included with the PowerPoint presentation.

The most common cause of videos to fail is a lack of a compatible compressor (CODEC).
MPEG1 (.MPG) videos are the most universally compatible, but tend to lose some image quality.
If .AVI or .MOV files are used, please follow the below guidelines:
The following are acceptable CODECs to use for .AVI files:
Cinepack, Indeo v 3.2, Microsoft RLE, Microsoft Video, and none/uncompressed.

The following are acceptable for use with QuickTime .MOV files:
Cinepack, video, and none/uncompressed. While PC PowerPoint will allow the importation of QuickTime files, in order to assure compatibility it is recommended to convert them to AVI or MPEG1 files.

DO NOT USE DIVX or any other NON-STANDARD CODEC!!!

The following parameters will help ensure compatibility in the above video formats:
Size not to exceed 352 x 240 (DV pixel scheme) or 320 x 240 (square pixel scheme).
Frame rate not to exceed 15fps. Audio not to exceed 16 bit 44k.
(35mm slide projection will not be available in scientific sessions)