Presenting BBP with Two Views (Using Microsoft PowerPoint)

MICROSOFT POWERPOINT offers you two views to present your Beyond Bullet Points (BBP) slides to your audiences: the usual Slide Show view and Presenter view.

Using slide show View and TooIs

When you present BBP slides using Slide Show view, all the elements you designed into the slides to help the audience’s working memory will also help you to present. The headlines will cue you about what to say, and the graphics will provide you with additional visual prompts. The changing layouts and optional navigational bar will keep you oriented to your place in the presentation and what comes next. These elements plus the thorough knowledge of your topic might be enough to keep you on track; if not.

In Slide Show view, you see your slides on your own laptop computer screen in the same full-screen format that your audience sees on the projector screen in the room. As you prepare your presentations, always check how your slides will look to the audience by using Slide Show view. To do this, on the Ribbon, go to the View tab, and in the Presentation Views group, click Slide Show to begin the presentation from the first slide—you do this by pressing the F5 key.

Another way to start your presentation is to go to the View toolbar on the status bar on the lower right in the window and then click the Slide Show button to begin the presentation from the current slide selected on your screen—also do this by holding down the Shift key while you press F5. Yet another way to start your presentation is from the Slide Show tab—in the Start Slide Show group, click either From Beginning or From Current Slide.


When you present in Slide Show view using a projector, connect your laptop to the projector as usual, following the instructions that come with your laptop and the projector. Connect your remote control device to the laptop so that you are able to advance and reverse the slides without distracting your audience. When you are in the Slide Show view of your presentation, move the mouse pointer to the lower-left corner of your screen to display four icons that allow you to access additional presenter tools. Click the Pen icon to access a Ballpoint Pen, Felt Tip Pen, or Highlighter tool (as shown in Figure B-1) that allows you to draw or highlight information on the screen. Use these tools if you have planned for their use on specific slides in your storyboard. You’ll be able to draw on the screen using a mouse.

Presenter tools available in Slide Show view when you move the mouse pointer to the icons in the lower-left corner of the screen—in this example, the Felt Tip Pen tool with a red color is selected.

FIGURE B-1 Presenter tools available in Slide Show view when you move the mouse pointer to the icons in the lower-left corner of the screen—in this example, the Felt Tip Pen tool with a red color is selected.

Before you begin the presentation, while the screen is not visible to the audience, select the pen and color you prefer—the Felt Tip Pen in red is a good combination for visibility. You will see a small dot somewhere on the screen indicating where your pen tip is—move it to the corner of the screen so that it is not easily visible to the audience. After you draw or highlight on the screen in Slide Show view, press the E key to erase ink from your screen, or press Ctrl + M to show/hide the ink markup. If you do add ink or highlighting to a slide, when you press Esc twice to exit Slide Show view, you will see a window that asks whether you want to keep or discard the ink annotations. You’ll normally want to keep the ink so that you have a record of what you wrote during the live presentation to send to audience members—you have the option to select and delete the ink from the slides later if you don’t want it.

If you use a Tablet PC to deliver your BBP presentation, use the stylus with the Slide Show view drawing tools to produce smoother, more natural handwriting on the screen than otherwise is possible to create using a mouse.

Using Presenter View and Tools

Presenter view gives you a range of features to manage a live presentation.

To use Presenter view

■    Connect your projector to the video port of your laptop.

■    If you see a Display Settings dialog box, click the monitor where you want to display your speaker notes, and select This Is My Main Monitor. (For more information about selecting monitor settings, visit Microsoft Windows Help to locate your Windows Display Settings).

■    Click the monitor icon for the second monitor where your audience will view the slides (the projector), select the Extend My Windows Desktop onto This Monitor check box, and click OK. Now the projector screen is an extension of your laptop screen—as you move the mouse pointer across your laptop screen, you should be able to continue to move it off the laptop screen and across the projector screen.

■    On the Slide Show tab, in the Monitors group, click Use Presenter View. Under the Show On pull-down menu, select the second monitor where your slides will be displayed to your audience (the projector).

Delivering a Presentation Using Presenter View

Now start the presentation as you would using Slide Show view—you’ll see the presentation in Presenter view on your laptop screen, as shown in Figure B-2.

Presenter view provides many features to help you present from your laptop screen.

FIGURE B-2 Presenter view provides many features to help you present from your laptop screen.

Here you’ll see many features that will help you as a presenter. The slide that your audience sees on the projector screen appears on the upper left, and below that is a bar that includes, from left to right, the current slide number out of the total slides, the time elapsed since you started the presentation, and the current time. On the upper right is a speaker notes pane that you zoom in or zoom out to resize, and at the bottom of the screen are slide thumbnails—the current slide is highlighted. Use the scroll bar to find another slide and click the slide to skip ahead to it.

Tip

To draw directly onto a slide in Presenter view using a mouse or the stylus of your Tablet PC, click the Pen icon and use the pens or highlighters to draw ink on the slide as you did in Slide Show view. When you add ink in Presenter view on your laptop screen, the ink image will not appear on the projector screen until you lift your pen.

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