Having given a fair number of presentations over the years, I have learned some new tricks about manipulating your presentation within PowerPoint. Being a little surprised that I never heard about them before, I just had to share them with you.
Thanks to Barbara Price’s BWPrice’s Marketing U site for an article on eight mistakes in making PowerPoint® presentations, written by Jim Prost of Fripp & Associates. I particularly like four techniques that gives a presenter more control over their presentation.
*To Make Screen Blank: When you want the audience to focus on you and what you are saying rather than on the slide, you can turn the screen blank by push the “B” key for a black screen and “W” for white. Push the key again to make slide reappear.
*Moving through your slides out of sequential: If you need to jump to a particular slide, e.g., slide 13, enter that number on your keypad and then press enter. It’s as easy as that.
*Use an onscreen pointer (just love this one): Push CTRL “P” and then hold the left mouse key down as you move around the slide – you can circle a word, underline, point to an item, whatever – as the article says using the “John Madden approach.” With a right click you can find how to erase whatever you have highlighted. This one is probably worth practicing a bit in advance.
*Create a Countdown Clock for your Break: This takes a little work, but if you want to put a countdown clock on the screen so people know when the break is over, here is a link that shows you how to do it. Cool!
Take a look at the article for a discussion of the mistakes that led to these tips and others.