Spit-and-Polish Your PowerPoint Pitch Six Last-Minute Tips for a Perfect Presentation Helen Bradley
Wed 4/24/02 -- Last-minute touches can make the difference between a ho-hum presentation and a polished, professional one. This week, I'll look at some things you should do when you're nearly finished creating a Microsoft PowerPoint show -- steps that will make your final run-through and the actual presentation a little easier, and help keep you and your audience in sync and on topic.
What's on the agenda? Slipped between your title and first set of bullet points, an agenda slide lets you show your audience what you'll be covering in your presentation. Let PowerPoint's summary slide feature create this overview for you instead of having to assemble the details yourself.
When your presentation layout is finished, choose View/Slide Sorter to switch to Slide Sorter view. The agenda is created using slide titles; hold the Shift key and click each slide you want included. On the Slide Sorter toolbar, locate and click the Summary Slide button. A new slide appears, containing the titles of the selected slides in the order they appear in the presentation. Move this slide into place in your presentation, and make final adjustments to its appearance. Note that the agenda slide won't be updated if you make changes to other slides, so leave it until the last minute to complete.
Testing, one, two, three. Often, when testing a slide show, you'll want to run your test from the current slide forward. To do this, click the Slide Show View button in the bottom left corner of the screen -- it plays the presentation beginning with the current slide.
Better still, hold the Ctrl key when you click the Slide Show View button, and the show plays in a small window on the screen, letting you move between PowerPoint and the show to make small changes if required. The hold-the-Ctrl-key trick also works when you click View Show on the Slide Show menu, displaying the entire presentation in a small window.
Fast moves. When you're making or testing your presentation, try some of these shortcut keys for moving around. To jump forward or backward to a particular slide in the presentation, type the slide number and press Enter. Alternately, right-click the screen and choose Go/By Title and click the title of the slide you want to move to.
Pressing N for Next or P for Previous moves from one slide to another in either direction, and can even back up through an animation effect. Pressing B or W pauses the show with a blank black or white screen; press the same key again to restart the presentation where you left off.
More handsome handouts. PowerPoint creates serviceable presentation handouts, but you can apply all the formatting power of Word to your handouts if you prefer. From within PowerPoint, choose File/Send To/Microsoft Word, and choose your preferred handout layout in the Send to Microsoft Word dialog.
Click OK to send the PowerPoint handouts to Word, where you can add more pages, number the pages, apply custom headers and footers, and otherwise edit the results before saving and printing them. If you chose the Paste Link option, the Word document will be updated if the slides referred therein change, but new slides or an altered order won't be reflected. So again, it's best to have your presentation finished before you create your handouts.
Starting a Screen Show. When giving a presentation, it looks nicer if your audience sees only your slides and not the PowerPoint program screen. So avoid launching your presentation from within PowerPoint, or double-clicking a .PPT file on your desktop or in Windows Explorer. Instead, save your presentation as a PowerPoint Show file.
Choose File/Save As and, from the "Save as type" drop-down list, choose PowerPoint Show (*.pps). Double-clicking the resulting file will launch directly into Slide Show mode, bypassing the regular PowerPoint screens. When the presentation is over, the Windows desktop will reappear. You can, if you wish, still open the .PPS file like any other presentation using File/Open from inside PowerPoint.
Saving Slides. You can also use your PowerPoint slides in other documents -- for example, in a brochure or flyer promoting the upcoming meeting. To do this, save one or more of your slides in a format that's easily imported into most graphics programs or Word, FrontPage, or whichever Office program you're using.
In Slide Sorter view, click the slide to save and choose File/Save As. From the "Save as type" list choose an option such as Windows Metafile (*.wmf), Device Independent Bitmap (*.bmp), or TIFF Tag Image File Format (*.tif) and type a name for the slide. When you're prompted to choose what to export, click the Current Slide Only option and then Save.
