My friend and colleague, Scott Hanselman, showed me long ago the value of making sure people can see what's on the screen when you are presenting. I spent this week giving talks about some new web-based apps we are rolling out, in a large room, and toward the end of the week I actually remembered something Scott had told me, and something he recently posted on his blog.

Fact of the matter is, between my marathon presentations every day this week and the rest of the things I have to worry about/deal with/etc., some of the people who had to sit through a few of the presentations were short-changed somewhat by the fact that the amount of information required to be on the screen at any point in time was large, the fonts were small, and therefore it was hard to see what I was referring to.

Toward the end of the week, I tried the tool Scott mentioned recently - UltraMagnifier. And it's pretty cool. Using this, I was able to highlight the things on the screen in the magnifier window that were otherwise difficult to read. I can set the magnification level and a myriad of other settings too numerous to mention, and it worked like a charm. It will take some getting used to on my part to really be able to use this tool effectively in my presentations, just because it's a change that requires me to re-wire my brain, but it's a good change so I will put the energy into it.

And - for anyone who gives presentations (even just now and then) - This is for you. Read it, learn, use it. Scott is the best damn technical presenter I know (and I am not ).