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Presentation Basics: A Quick Review
I'm assuming that you already know how to start a presentation, right? Just switch to Slide Show view. Then, click the mouse to move to the next slide or activate the next animation. Depending on how you switch to Slide Show view, however, you'll start in a different spot.If you use the View⇨Slide Show or Slide Show⇨View Show commands, or press F5, you'll start at the beginning.
If you click the Slide Show view icon in the bottom left corner of the screen, or press Shift+F5, you'll start with whatever slide was active when you did it.
This is by design; the latter method enables you to quickly check a single slide in Slide Show view without paging through all the others.
| Tip | If you want the slide show to start in Slide Show view when you double-click it from a file management window, rather than opening in Normal view in PowerPoint, rename the file so that its extension is .pps instead of the regular .ppt. |
The following sections briefly review the basics of presentation navigation.
Displaying the Controls
In Slide Show view, the mouse pointer and show controls are hidden. To make the mouse pointer and the controls appear, move the mouse.Moving the mouse makes four icons appear in the bottom left corner of the slide. They are rather faint, so they don't distract from the main presentation, but they're obvious if you're looking for them-see Figure 15-1. If you want to hide them again after displaying them, type A or =, or press Ctrl+H.
Figure 15-1: Presentation controls in the bottom left corner in Slide Show view.
| Tip | Pressing A or = is not a true toggle; it cycles between three states each time you press one of those keys. The three states are On, Off, and Flash, which makes the items appear briefly on-screen. |
Displaying the Slides Menu
Those two middle icons at the bottom left corner of the screen both open menus. The one that looks like a pencil opens the Pen menu, which we'll talk about later in the chapter. The Slides icon-the one that looks like a rectangle-opens the Slides menu, as shown in Figure 15-2. I'll explain the specifics of this menu later in the chapter.
Figure 15-2: Click the Slides icon, or right-click anywhere, to open the Slides menu during the presentation.
You can also open this same exact Slide Show menu by right-clicking anywhere on the slide. There's no difference. Therefore, that icon doesn't get much real-life use because why would you take the trouble to click directly on a little icon if you could right-click anywhere to get the same thing?
Going Forward and Backward
The arrow buttons are Back and Forward-obvious, right? Back moves you to the previous slide or animation, and Forward moves you to the next one.
| Note | Reread that last sentence above, because there's something important there you may have missed: "to the previous slide or animation." The arrow buttons do not necessarily move you to the next slide; they simply advance or go back one step in the presentation. If, for example, there are six animated events on a slide, the arrow buttons would go to the next event or take back the previous one, all on the same slide. |
Most people never use those arrow buttons on-screen because there are so many faster and easier ways to go forward and backward in a presentation as follows:
To go forward: N, spacebar, right arrow, down arrow, Enter, Page Down, or left-click, or open the Slides menu and choose Next.
To go backward: P, Backspace, left arrow, up arrow, or Page Up, or open the Slides menu and choose Previous.
Notice that the left mouse button takes you forward, but the right mouse button does not take you backward. That's because the right mouse button is used to display the Slides menu. (But see the following tip.)
You can also go to the last slide viewed. This is usually the same thing as the previous slide, but if you've been jumping around (see the next section), it may not be. To revisit the last slide viewed, display the Slides menu and choose Last Viewed.
Jumping to Specific Slides
There are several ways to jump to a particular slide. One of the easiest is to select the slide from the Slides menu. Choose Go to Slide, and then click the slide you want to go to. Hidden slides (see the next section) appear with their slide numbers in parentheses. The currently displayed slide appears with a check mark next to it (see Figure 15-3).
Figure 15-3: Go to a specific slide from the Go to Slide command on the Slides menu.
You can also jump to a certain slide number, if you happen to know the number, by typing that number and pressing Enter.One more way-you can press Ctrl+S to open the All Slides dialog box, and then make your selection there and click OK (see Figure 15-4).
Figure 15-4: Select the slide to display from the All Slides dialog box.
To go back to the beginning of the presentation, you can either type 1 and press Enter, or hold down the left and right mouse buttons together for two seconds.
Blanking the Screen
Sometimes during a live presentation there may be a delay. Whether it's a chatty audience member with a complicated question, a fire drill, or just a potty break, you'll want to pause your show.Assuming that you have the slides set for manual transition, the show isn't going anywhere. However, whatever slide you stopped on will remain on the screen until you get going again, and perhaps you don't want that. (It can be distracting to the audience, especially if the pause is to let someone get up and speak at a podium in front of the projection screen.)The solution: turn the screen into a blank black or white expanse. To do so, type W or a comma (for white), or B or a period (for black). To return to the presentation do the same again, or press any key on the keyboard, or click either the right or left mouse button.
| Tip | While the screen is plain black or plain white, you can draw on it with the Pen tool (which I'll discuss later in the chapter), so it makes a nice quickie "scratch pad." However, there are a couple of quirks with it. First, you must select the pen before blanking the screen, because there is no way to open the Pen menu from a blank screen unless a pen pointer is already selected. (When the pen pointer is selected first and then the screen is blanked, the Pen icon is available at the bottom left corner of the screen for changing pen colors.) Second, any annotations you make with the pen while on the blank screen will not be saved; when you resume the presentation, they're gone forever. |
Getting Help
Don't feel like you have to remember all the shortcut keys I've been bombarding you with; help is available. In Slide Show view, right-click to display the Slides menu and choose Help to open the Slide Show Help dialog box shown in Figure 15-5, listing all the important shortcut keys.
Figure 15-5: Jog your memory regarding keyboard shortcuts by displaying the Slide Show Help dialog box.
