Chapter 5
IN THIS CHAPTER
Writing, editing, and printing speaker notes
Going from slide to slide in a live presentation
Drawing on slides during a presentation
Delivering a presentation when you can’t be there in person
At last, the big day has arrived. It’s time to give the presentation. “Break a leg,” as actors say before they go on stage. This chapter explains how to rehearse your presentation to find out how long it is and how to show your presentation. You discover some techniques to make your presentation livelier, including how to draw on slides with a pen or highlighter and blank out the screen to get the audience’s full attention. The chapter describes how to handle the speaker notes and print handouts for your audience. In case you can’t be there in person to deliver your presentation, this chapter shows you how to create a user-run presentation, a self-running presentation, and video of a presentation.
Notes are strictly for the speaker. The unwashed masses can’t see them. Don’t hesitate to write notes to yourself when you put together your presentation. The notes will come in handy when you’re rehearsing and giving your presentation. They give you ideas for what to say and help you communicate better. Here are instructions for entering, editing, and printing notes:
Slide presentations and theatrical presentations have this in common: They are as good as the number of times you rehearse them. Be sure to rehearse your presentation many times over. The more you rehearse, the more comfortable you are giving a presentation. Follow these steps to rehearse a presentation, record its length, and record how long each slide is displayed:
Click the Rehearse Timings button.
The Recording toolbar appears, as shown in Figure 5-1, and you switch to Slide Show view.
Give your presentation one slide at a time and click the Next button on the Recording toolbar to go from slide to slide.
When each slide appears, imagine that you’re presenting it to an audience. Say what you intend to say during the real presentation. If you anticipate audience members asking questions, allot time for questions.
The Recording toolbar tells you how long each slide has been displayed and how long your presentation is so far. You can do these tasks from the Recording toolbar:
In the dialog box that asks whether you want to keep the slide timings, note how long your presentation is (refer to Figure 5-1).
Is your presentation too long or too short? I hope, like baby bear’s porridge, your presentation is “just right.” But if it’s too long or short, you have some work to do. You have to figure out how to shorten or lengthen it.
In the dialog box that asks whether you want to keep the new slide timings, click Yes if you want to see how long each slide stayed onscreen during the rehearsal.
By clicking Yes, you can go to Slide Sorter view and see how long each slide remained onscreen.
Compared to the preliminary work, giving a presentation can seem kind of anticlimactic. All you have to do is go from slide to slide and woo your audience with your smooth-as-silk voice and powerful oratory skills. Well, at least the move-from-slide-to-slide part is pretty easy. These pages explain how to start and end a presentation, all the different ways to advance or retreat from slide to slide, and how to jump to different slides.
Here are the different ways to start a presentation from the beginning:
You can start a presentation in the middle by selecting a slide in the middle and then clicking the Slide Show view button or going to the Slide Show tab and clicking the From Current Slide button.
Here are the different ways to end a presentation prematurely:
In a nutshell, PowerPoint offers four ways to move from slide to slide in a presentation. Table 5-1 describes techniques for navigating a presentation using the four different ways:
TABLE 5-1 Techniques for Getting from Slide to Slide
To Go Here |
Button |
Right-Click and Choose… |
Keyboard Shortcut |
Next slide* |
Next |
Next |
Enter, spacebar, N, PgDn, ↓, or → |
Previous slide |
Previous |
Previous |
Backspace, P, PgUp, ↑, or ← |
Specific slide |
Slides |
See All Slides |
Slide number+Enter; Ctrl+S and then select Slide number and title |
Last viewed slide |
Slide Control |
Last Viewed |
|
First slide |
Home | ||
Last slide |
End |
* If animations are on a slide, commands for going to the next slide instead make animations play in sequence. To bypass animations and go to the next slide, use a command for going forward across several slides. (See “Jumping forward or backward to a specific slide.”)
To go forward from one slide to the following slide in a presentation, click onscreen. After you click, the next slide appears. If all goes well, clicking is the only technique you need to know when giving a presentation to go from slide to slide, but Table 5-1 lists other ways to go to the next slide in a presentation as well as techniques for going backward to the previous slide.
If you find it necessary to jump forward or backward across several slides in your presentation to get to the slide you want to show, it can be done with these techniques:
Herewith are a few tricks to make your presentations a little livelier. I explain how to draw on slides, highlight parts of slides, blank the screen, and zoom in. Take this bag of tricks to your next PowerPoint presentation to make your presentation stand out.
Drawing on slides is an excellent way to add a little something to a presentation. Whip out a pen and draw on a slide to get the audience’s attention. Draw to underline words or draw check marks as you hit the key points, as shown in Figure 5-3.
Follow these steps during a presentation to draw or highlight on a slide:
Click the Pen button and choose a color on the pop-up menu.
The Pen button is located in the lower-left corner of the screen (refer to Figure 5-3).
Press Esc when you’re finished using the pen or highlighter.
Be careful not to press Esc twice because the second press tells PowerPoint to end the presentation.
You can also right-click, choose Pointer Options, and make selections on the submenu to draw or highlight (choose Ink Color to choose a color).
Follow these instructions to hide and erase pen and highlighter markings during a slide presentation:
Follow these instructions to erase or hide pen and highlighter markings after a slide presentation:
If you prefer not to see the Want to Keep Ink Annotations? dialog box because you intend never to keep your markings, go to the File tab and choose Options. In the PowerPoint Options dialog box, select the Advanced category and deselect the Prompt to Keep Ink Annotations When Exiting check box.
Follow these instructions to blank out the screen during a presentation:
To see a PowerPoint slide again, click onscreen or press any key on the keyboard.
Yet another way to add pizazz to a presentation is to zoom in on slides. To draw the audience’s attention to part of a slide, you can magnify it by following these steps:
Click the Zoom button in the lower-left corner of the screen.
You can also right-click and choose Zoom In. The pointer changes to a magnifying glass.
Let me count the ways that you can deliver a presentation without being there in person:
The rest of this chapter explains these techniques for delivering a presentation when you can’t be there in the flesh.
Handouts are thumbnail versions of slides that you print and distribute to the audience. Figure 5-4 shows examples of handouts. Handouts come in one, two, three, four, six, or nine slides per page. If you select three slides per page, the handout includes lines that your audience can take notes on (see Figure 5-4); the other sizes don’t offer these lines.
To tell PowerPoint how to construct handouts, go to the View tab and click the Handout Master button. In Handout Master view, on the Handout Master tab, you can do a number of things to make your handouts more useful and attractive. As you make your choices, keep your eye on the sample handout page; it shows what your choices mean in real terms.
To print handouts, go to the File tab and choose Print (or press Ctrl+P). You see the Print window. Under Settings, open the second drop-down list, and under Handouts, choose how many slides to print on each page. Then click the Print button.
A self-running, kiosk-style presentation is one that plays on its own. You can make it play from a kiosk or simply send it to coworkers so that they can play it. In a self-running presentation, slides appear onscreen one after the other without you or anyone else having to advance the presentation from slide to slide. When the presentation finishes, it starts all over again from Slide 1.
PowerPoint offers two ways to indicate how long you want each slide to stay onscreen:
Before you can “self-run” a presentation, you have to tell PowerPoint that you want it to do that. Self-running presentations don’t have the control buttons in the lower-left corner. You can’t click the screen or press a key to move forward or backward to the next or previous slide. The only control you have over a self-running presentation is pressing the Esc key (pressing Esc ends the presentation).
Follow these steps to make yours a kiosk-style, self-running presentation:
Click the Set Up Slide Show button.
You see the Set Up Slide Show dialog box.
Under Show Type, choose the Browsed at a Kiosk (Full Screen) option.
When you select this option, PowerPoint automatically selects the Loop Continuously Until ‘Esc’ check box.
Click OK.
That’s all there is to it.
A user-run, or interactive, presentation is one that the viewer gets to control. The viewer decides which slide appears next and how long each slide remains onscreen. User-run presentations are similar to websites. Users can browse from slide to slide at their own speed. They can pick and choose what they want to investigate. They can backtrack and view slides they saw previously or return to the first slide and start anew.
Self-run presentations are shown in Reading view (click the Reading View button on the status bar to see what self-run presentations look like). A taskbar appears along the bottom of the screen. On the right side of the taskbar, viewers can click the Previous button or Next button to go from slide to slide. They can also click the Menu button to open a pop-up menu with commands for navigating slides.
Another way to help readers get from slide to slide is to create action buttons. An action button is a button that you can click to go to another slide in your presentation or the previous slide you viewed, whatever that slide was. PowerPoint provides 12 action buttons in the Shapes gallery. Figure 5-6 shows some action buttons and the dialog box you use to create them.
After you draw an action button from the Shapes gallery, the Action Settings dialog box shown in Figure 5-6 appears so that you can tell PowerPoint which slide to go to when the button is clicked. Select the slide (or master slide) that needs action and follow these steps to adorn it with an action button:
Click an action button to select it.
Choose the button that best illustrates which slide will appear when the button is clicked.
Draw the button on the slide.
To do so, drag the pointer in a diagonal fashion. (As far as drawing them is concerned, action buttons work the same as all other shapes and other objects. Book 8, Chapter 4 explains how to manipulate objects.) The Action Settings dialog box shown in Figure 5-6 appears after you finish drawing your button.
On the Hyperlink To drop-down list, choose an action for the button.
You can go to the next slide, the previous slide, the first or last slide in a presentation, the last slide you viewed, or a specific slide.
To make clicking the action button take users to a specific slide, choose Slide on the list. You see the Hyperlink to Slide dialog box, which lists each slide in your presentation. Select a slide and click OK.
To play a sound when your action button is activated, select the Play Sound check box and select a sound on the drop-down list.
“Mouse-over” hyperlinks require sound accompaniment so that users understand when they’ve activated an action button.
Click OK in the Actions Settings dialog box.
To test your button, you can right-click it and choose Open Link.
To change a button’s action, select it and then click the Action button on the Insert tab, or right-click your action button and choose Edit Link. In the Action Settings dialog box, choose a new action (or None) and click OK.
Follow these steps to declare yours a user-run presentation:
Click the Set Up Slide Show button.
You see the Set Up Show dialog box.
Click OK.
Your presentation is no longer quite yours. It also belongs to all the people who view it in your absence.
Presenting online means to play a presentation on your computer for others who watch it over the Internet. As you go from slide to slide, audience members see the slides on their web browsers. Presenting online is an excellent way to show a presentation to others during a conference call or to others who don’t have PowerPoint.
Office 365 creates a temporary web address for you to show your presentation. Before showing it, you send audience members a link to this web address. Audience members, in turn, click the link to open and watch your presentation in their web browsers.
Follow these steps to show a presentation online:
On the Slide Show tab, click the Present Online button.
The Present Online dialog box appears.
Click the Connect button.
Office 365 generates a URL link for you to send to the people who will view your presentation, as shown in Figure 5-7.
Send the link to your audience.
You can send the link with Outlook or another email software.
Click the Start Presentation button.
Audience members see the presentation in their browsers.
Give the presentation.
Use the same techniques to advance or retreat from slide to slide as you use in any presentation.
When the presentation ends, you land in the Present Online tab.
On the Present Online tab, click the End Online Presentation button; click End Online Presentation in the confirmation dialog box.
Your audience sees this notice: “The presentation has ended.”
Yet another way to distribute a video is to record it in an MPEG-4 file and distribute the file on a CD or DVD, distribute it by email, or post it on the Internet. PowerPoint offers a command for creating an MPEG-4 version of a presentation. Every aspect of a PowerPoint presentation, including transitions, animations, sound, video itself, and voice narrations, is recorded in the presentation video.
Figure 5-8 shows an MPEG-4 version of a PowerPoint presentation being played in Windows Media Player.
Follow these steps to create an MPEG-4 version of a PowerPoint presentation:
Choose Create a Video.
You see the Create a Video window.
Open the second drop-down list and choose whether to use recorded timings and narrations.
Your choices are twofold. If you recorded a voice narration for your PowerPoint presentation, choose the second option if you want to preserve the voice narration in the video.
Open the second drop-down list and choose Preview Timings and Narrations.
Your presentation video plays. How do you like it? This is what your video will look and sound like after you save it as a video file.
Click the Create Video button.
The Save As dialog box opens.
Choose a folder for storing the MPEG-4 file, enter a name for the file, and click the Save button.
The status bar along the bottom of the PowerPoint screen shows the progress of the video as it is being created. Creating a video can take several minutes, depending on how large your PowerPoint presentation is and how many fancy gizmos, such as sound and animation, it contains.