CERF 2025 Oral Presentation Guidelines

Oral presentations are a central component of CERF conferences and provide participants with a valuable opportunity to share their research and network. Please read these instructions carefully to help ensure your presentation is a success. 

What to Expect During Your In-Person Presentation 

For traditional oral talks, each presenter will be given 12 minutes to present followed by a 3-minute question and answer period. For those presenting lightning talks, two lightning talks will fit in a traditional oral talk slot; therefore, you will have 5 minutes for your presentation, followed by approximately 2 minutes for questions and answers.

Your session room laptop will have your presentation clearly viewable on the desktop. Simply double-click your presentation and control it from the podium using the computer mouse or the up/down/right/left keys on a keyboard. A PowerPoint remote/laser pointer will also be included in each room.

Roaming Audio/Visual technicians will be located in close proximity to all meeting rooms and will be available to provide assistance if required. A student worker will also be assigned to each meeting room and can help track down an AV technician.

Accessibility

We encourage all presenters to consider making your presentations accessible to all in the audience. Small changes can greatly improve the accessibility and thus, the impact, of your presentation. This website provides some great tips and links to additional resources.

Specifications

Computer Equipment
The computers in the meeting rooms will be PCs with Windows 7 or Windows 10, Office 2013 Standard, Acrobat Reader, and Apple QuickTime. Personal laptops cannot be used in the session rooms. All presentations must be uploaded via the online system at least 12 hours before your talk.

Creating Your Presentation
All presentations must be created in, or converted to, Microsoft PowerPoint. AV will be prepared to present in 16:9 but if your slide aspect ratio is different (e.g. 4:3) it can be shown but will not occupy the entire screen.

Acceptable formats** for presentations: PowerPoint (.ppt, .pps, or .pptx); Adobe Acrobat (.pdf).

Video & Audio Files
The recommended video format for Windows-based presentations is Windows Media (.wmv).

Image files are embedded directly into PowerPoint when the file is saved, while video and audio files are not. Only a link is made to those files. Copy your video and audio clips into the same folder as your presentation PowerPoint file. This will eliminate the problem of PowerPoint losing the link to the file. Follow this same procedure with any fonts that might not be installed on the meeting room laptops.

**Macintosh Users
Please make sure that all inserted pictures are either JPEG or PNG file-types. Quicktime (.mov) files are also an accepted video format. Presenters using Macintosh’s Keynote program should consult Apple technical documentation for directions on converting their presentation to PowerPoint. This conversion should be completed prior to transmission to a meeting room PC laptop.

Fonts
Arial and Helvetica are recommended for clarity and compatibility. Use a font size of at least 24 points for body text and 36–40 points for headings. Light colored text on a dark background is advised. Avoid using red or green. Recommended maximum number of lines in text slides is no more than 6 or 7.

Images
The size of the screen will be 1920 pixels X 1080 pixels, meaning that any image with more pixels in the X or Y coordinate that is more than that will not be displayed. The image will be altered by PowerPoint to fit. Large images (i.e. 2000 x 1500 pixels) which are created with digital cameras and scanners will make the resulting PowerPoint file very large. This may cause the presentation to load slowly. This can be avoided by inserting images with the following properties:

1. For on-screen presentations, JPEG-type images work well. This type of image file can be created with virtually all imaging programs.
2. Using a graphics program:
3. Change the size of the image to approximately 800 x 600 pixels
4. Save as file type (.jpeg).
5. Select compression setting of 8 (High quality image)
6. Insert all images into PowerPoint as (.jpeg) files. If you copy the images to the clipboard and then Edit/Paste them into PowerPoint, the images will not be compressed and the PowerPoint file can become very large. To avoid this, insert them directly into PowerPoint (Insert/Picture/from File).

Animations
Use animations only if they are absolutely necessary to convey a particular message.

Submissions Process for In-Person Presentation Files

Presenters must submit presentations via a link in their program portal at least 12 hours before the start of their session. You can access the program portal via personalized link in emails sent by the Abstract Manager. You can also log in directly to the submission platform using the email and password you used to submit your abstract. Slides must be .pdf, .ppt; .pptx, or .pps files.

There will not be a speaker preview room at CERF 2025, because all edits and updates can be done from your laptop in any space with an internet connection. If you update your slide deck, return to the program portal and upload the new version. The currently saved version will be replaced by the new version. The presentation tile will include a ‘View File’ link If your slide deck was uploaded successfully. This is the only confirmation needed. Please note:  If you upload within 12 hours of your session it is very likely that your slide deck will not make it to the session room, so be sure to upload at least 12 hours in advance of your session.

If you have questions, please email [email protected] or look for them on-site near the registration desk.