Below are some thoughts on presenting. The idea is to make your slides very clear and to maximize the use of your limited screen real estate.

You should also make your slides robust. You cannot guarantee that the seminar room will be set up the way you like. I have presented in rooms where I could not leave the podium, in rooms where I could not access the mouse, in rooms where someone else advances the slides for you, in rooms where the projector is weak and does not show color well…you want to be ready for anything.

Some of these things are important and some of these are idiosyncratic. Take it all with a grain of salt.

Big ideas

Strive for one idea per slide.

Plan on 2-3 minutes per slide. An hour-long talk might be just 20 slides.

Use the title of the slide to convey information. Don't have a title say "introduction" or "model." Use titles like "firm decision problem" or "fact #1: Large firms are R&D intensive."

Develop your example before the seminar. Don't make it up as you go. Use the same example throughout your presentation. Don't start by talking about General Motors in the introduction, then switch to Raytheon when explaining the mechanism, and use Cargill in the conclusion. Find the perfect example and stick to it. This is a good strategy for job market interviews, too.

Presentations should not be mystery novels. Even if you have a "puzzle" paper, let the audience know up front what the resolution will be. Otherwise, the audience will spend the seminar trying to guess it.

Displaying slides

Every seminar room I have been in had a PC. If you normally work on a Mac, make sure you know your way around windows.

Try to open your slides in a pdf viewer like acrobat. If the default application is a web browser, right click on your slides and choose "open with."

In many applications, ctrl+L switches to full screen mode.

Slide sizes

Most projectors are now set up for 16×9 perspective. Don't waste that extra real estate! Use \documentclass[aspectratio=169]{beamer} in your preamble. I know a guy who likes 16×10 because it is closer to the golden ratio. I don't know, maybe that's a good idea.

Figures

Use big labels on figures (axes labels, legend text,...). The default size you use for the paper is too small. This is especially true when there are several figures on one slide.

Try to minimize the number of figures on a slide.

Try out your slides before the presentation. Find a room and project your slides. Stand in the back of the room. How are label sizes? Line widths? Now pretend you are old: squint at the slides. Is everything still clear?

Something like 8 percent of men are red-green colorblind. Be inclusive: do not use red and green on the same slide. It is also a good idea to use markers or line styles to differentiate lines. You may be presenting on a projector with a bad bulb, or the room may be very bright. In general, don't count on color doing all the work.

Keep the number of lines in a figure as small as possible.

Latex in figures usually uses a different font than the rest of the figure that is smaller and lighter weight. You might need to adjust it separately from the other font's size.

If you only have two or three lines on a figure and they are clearly distinct, label the lines with text directly on the figure, rather than use a legend.

Would this figure be better in logs? Normalized by size/sales/employment/population?

Buttons

Buttons are dangerous. Don't count on the mouse being convenient to get to. This is especially ugly with zoom and a presentation remote, where using the mouse may bring the floating meeting controls back on screen, steal the focus from your slides, etc.

Buttons are also distracting. If I see a button on the screen, I want to see it pushed. It's even worse when the button has a name on it like "more details." One solution is to make the buttons white, or link from some text on the slide so it is not so obvious.

In general, I minimize buttons and just insert slides that I can skip over if I don't need them.

Tables

Keep the number of significant digits to a minimum. If it is not important that Z=3.122 compared to Z= 3.123, go with Z=3.12 or even 3.1.

The siunitx package in Latex allows for aligning a column on the decimal point.

Remotes

For the job market, you might want to bring a presentation remote with you. This way, you know how to use the remote, which button is the laser pointer, etc.

Zoom

This is less important than it used to be, but zoom is still a fact of life.

Get used to hiding the video window and the floating meeting controls (ctrl+alt+shift+h).

If you interact with zoom (perhaps you had to re-hide the zoom controls because you pressed a button) tap on your pdf again to give the focus back to your slides. Otherwise, the remote will not work.