Polish Your Presentation With Presenter View In PowerPoint

by Promod Sharma, President 2011-2012, CC


"It's easier to find a new audience than to write a new speech."
--- Dan Kennedy, marketer

If you deliver the same presentation over and over, you'll soon know what to say. That's comforting. It's also boring. Why not put a video on YouTube and get to something new?

My presentations keep changing. This is riskier but warranted: the audiences vary and my thinking evolves. Elements get re-used but there is usually something new.

The challenge is adding polish when your content is fresh. You can’t easily practice an hour long session. PowerPoint comes to your rescue.

Rescue

The Presenter View is your easy-to-overlook friend. When you’re designing a slide, you probably know what you want to say  --- especially if you tend to use bullet points. Even then, you may want to say things in a particular way.

The bigger challenge is the transition between slides. Polish comes from knowing what to say just before or just as the next slide appear.

Tips

To use Presenter View, you need two displays. On one you show what the audience will see. The other shows what you'll see. You can decide which monitor is which. I put the Presenter View on my notebook computer. The second display could be a monitor or a projector.

Depending on your computer, you may need to press a combination of keys to use an Extended Display with different content on each screen. In Windows 7, pressing the Windows key and P at the same time may be enough.

Live

When presenting live, I use Presenter View often. Projectors vary. They often show the same content on your screen and the big screen ("cloning"). That's of no use. If you arrive early, you'll have time to experiment and get the settings right.

For best results, use your own computer.

Links

• How to master your presentations using Presenter View (How-To Gook)
• Do you stay up late the night before your presentation?
• How to make your message stick
• Three permanent fears for presenters
• Presenting enthusiasm
• image courtesy of How To Earn And Keep Trust (presented for the first time, earlier today)

Promod Sharma has been using Presenter View for years when developing, practicing and delivering presentations like Be The One They Want for job seekers.