Chapter 11: Creating Presentations Just Got Easier

In This Chapter

• Making choices in task panes with your pen

• Handwriting on slides, notes, and the outline

• Working on presentations with voice commands

• Running a presentation from your Tablet PC

• Using ink to add notes during a presentation

• Changing the presentation orientation

Once upon a time, people who gave presentations used blackboards or flip charts to write down their key points. They’d cover the pages with exclamation points and little smiley faces and jot notes in the margins. At the end of the presentation, somebody would rip all the flip chart pages down off the wall where the presenter had taped them and gave them to some poor assistant to type up and mail to everybody who had been at the meeting.

Fast-forward to the late twentieth century. Somebody invents computer presentation software (Mr. PowerPoint, I think), and a revolution is started. All presentations now appear on neat computer screens with formal typefaces and crisp columns of bullets. And the presentations can be printed out without any poor soul having to balance 3-foot-by-4-foot sheets of paper on his or her desk to type up notes.

PowerPoint is wonderful, but let’s face it: Somewhere along the way, presentations got stodgy and lifeless. Where’s the handwritten scrawl of the presenter? How boring is it to create long series of bullet points by just typing them in? Enter Tablet PC. Now you can draw and write on slides, use your pen to navigate your slide show, and even build your presentation by using voice commands. Say hallelujah!