More Tips for Speakers

Rick's tips for speakers has an excellent list of things all speakers should do before presenting a session. It prompted me to post one of my own: controlling your fonts.

One thing that's always distracting to attendees is when a speaker has to constantly increase the font size of every window they open. This is really unnecessary because it's very easy to do it in advance. Obviously, for sample forms you create, you should use a large font, such as Arial 14 or 16 bold, but what about Windows dialogs and VFP windows?

You can easily control Windows dialogs with a special theme you set up in advance. I have one I call "Demo" because that's what it's for. To create such a theme, right-click on the Windows desktop and choose Properties. Select the Appearance page and click Advanced. Change Size to 29 and Font Size to 14 for the following elements: Active Title Bar, Caption Buttons, Inactive Title Bar, Message Box, Change Size to 21 and Font Size to 12 for Menu, Selected Items, and Tooltip. Choose OK, then select the Theme page, click Save As, and save the new theme in the default folder (My Documents). You can then switch back to your normal theme. Before you start a presentation, switch to your saved presentation theme and all Windows dialogs will be readable to everyone in the room. After the presentation, switch back to your normal theme.

The settings for VFP windows are stored in the Registry, so before you begin changing things, save the current settings by running RegEdit, navigating to HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\VisualFoxPro\9.0, and choosing Export from the File menu to save to a file such as VFP9Normal.REG. Launch VFP, choose Options from the Tools menu, and select the IDE page. For each of the window types (including Program Files, Memo Fields, and Browse), change the font size to 16 bold and be sure to turn on Override Individual Settings so all windows will use the desired font size. Close the Options dialog and exit VFP. Run RegEdit again, navigate to HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\VisualFoxPro\9.0, and choose Export from the File menu, saving the settings to a file such as VFP9Demo.REG. You can then restore your normal settings by double-clicking VFP9Normal.REG. Before you start a presentation, double-click VFP9Demo.REG and all code, BROWSE, and Memo windows will be readable to everyone in the room. After the presentation, double-click VFP9Normal.REG.

With these two simple changes, you can completely eliminate the need to apologize and change the font size for every window in your presentation (or worse, make your attendees shout out "Bump up the font!").