Here is a collection of the more substantial suggestions we received, published in each case with the author's consent. These contributions are informal, vary in style, and are only very lightly edited.
We'd like to thank these contributors and encouage others to follow suit.
These tools also allow you easily to reuse and rearrange and modify your slides, to design a slide show with animation effects, various kinds of "interesting" revealing line by line (I hate this peice of paper, too because of this "you can't be trusted ..."!), and so on.
I like these tools (LATeX is IMHO the wrong one for this application) and I think people like it because they very often ask: "how did you do it".
One concluding remark: I think your paper is intended to give hints how to make "good presentations" but then it shouldn't be based on the "night before in the hotel" assumption --- perhaps a common, but not a desirable situation.
Watch out for those expensive seminars where organisers hire very expensive hotel with smart executive seminar suites where the ceiling is too low! Result? Screen is below the level of the front desk and nobody can read it. When I started in teaching, I was sent on a training course for new lecturers. The presenter of this course spent here entire time looking at her slides on the OHP. Needless to say, they were projected onto her body, not the screen. And why are there so many professionals who lack the simple spatial awareness and geometric skills to line up the slide with the lit-up area on the screen? I'm fed up trying to read bits of info. off the ceiling or wall while there are huge blank areas on the screen!
I think Microsoft have had a negative effect on research seminars --- I've been to several where the presentation was entirely designed using Powerpoint. It has lots of different colours and shapes and interesting backdrop effects for your slides, but does tend to lead to every presentation being composed up entirely from (pretty) bullet point displays.
This doesn't preclude being honest about the technical shortcomings of the work itself (which you should be); but mention them in their place rather than apologising for them in advance.
Doing a practice run in front of a mirror can be revealing. Mumbling, speaking to your notes, etc. can be fought effectively by speaking only when you have eye contact with a member of the audience. Not the same person all the time, though!
Say something interesting. If you're short of time, pick one subtopic and say something interesting about it, and forget the rest. Few things annoy an audience more than hearing "well, the rest of that's in the paper" every two minutes. Especially since it usually comes just as you were starting to talk about something in enough detail to actually be worth listening to. If there isn't time to cover everything well, don't try. (This is especially true if you find yourself unexpectedly short of time. Dashing through half a dozen topics in five minutes means you can't say anything interesting about any of them.)
Say something your competitors would find fascinating. If they wouldn't find your talk interesting, the rest of the audience probably won't either.
Remember that your audience can read. Rather than reciting the results in the paper, talk about how you got them, especially what problems you solved and what mistakes you made, or about the implications.
Plan your slides for visual content. Pictures should be worth a thousand words. If a slide doesn't make sense shown backwards, it has too many words and not enough picture -- take it out. The outline of your talk belongs in your notes, not on your slides.
Using visual media for things with visual content also does wonders for the poor people at the back of the audience who can't read your 3-point type anyway. If you must put words on your slides, 24-point type is about the minimum. For viewgraphs, stand up and drop them on the floor at your feet; if you can't read them that way, the print's too small.
Once when I found I had to cut a talk severely -- by about a factor of four -- I resorted to writing a full script, literally writing out every word I was going to say. This let me time things quite precisely, and helped a lot in figuring out exactly what would fit. When I gave the talk, I didn't follow the script word for word, but it was there to fall back on if I got stuck. Too much preparation is better than not enough.
Visit the washroom shortly before your talk.