Using the On-screen Show Controls

When you display a slide show, the mouse pointer and show controls are hidden. To make them appear, you can move the mouse. When you do this, very faint buttons appear in the bottom-left corner of the slide show, as shown in Figure 20.1, and the mouse pointer also appears. You can toggle the pointer and these buttons on and off by pressing A or = (equals). Ctrl+H hides the pointer and buttons. When you toggle this feature on, the following buttons appear:

• Back, the leftmost button, takes you back to the previous slide, or to the previous animation event if the present slide contains animation.

• Pen, next to Back, opens a menu for controlling the appearance of the pen or pointer. (I discuss this feature later in this chapter.)

• Slide, which displays a box icon, opens a menu for navigating between slides. You can also open the navigation menu, shown in Figure 20.2, by right-clicking anywhere on the slide.

  EXPERT TIP 

  You can set up your show to move backwards when you click the right-mouse button. Choose Office PowerPoint Options, click Advanced, and in the Slide Show section deselect the Show Menu on Right Mouse Click check box. If you do that, you can't right-click to open the navigation menu, though.

• Forward, the rightmost button, moves you to the next slide. Normally, you can just click to go to the next slide, but if you are using the pen (covered later in this chapter), then clicking it causes it to draw, rather than advance the presentation. In this situation, you can use the Forward button.

  Note 

  Because the slide navigation menu that appears is identical whether you click the Slide button or right-click anywhere on the slide, this chapter only mentions the right-click method whenever you need to choose something from this menu. However, keep in mind that you can also click the Slide button if you prefer.

Figure 20.1: Buttons appear in the bottom-left corner of a slide in Slide Show view. The third button opens a menu that controls navigation between slides.

Figure 20.2: Click the Slide button or right-click on the slide to open this menu.

There are a lot of shortcut keys to remember when working in Slide Show view, and so PowerPoint provides a handy summary of these keys. To see them, right-click and choose Help, or press F1. The Slide Show Help dialog box appears, as shown in Figure 20.3. Click OK to close this dialog box when you are done.

Figure 20.3: The Slide Show Help dialog box provides a quick summary of the shortcut keys that are available during a presentation.

Moving from Slide to Slide

The simplest way to move through a presentation is to move to the next slide. To do so, you can use any of these methods:

• Press any of these keys: N, Spacebar, right arrow, down arrow, Enter, or Page Down.

• Click the left-mouse button.

• Right-click and then choose Next.

• Click the right-pointing arrow button in the bottom-left corner of the slide.

If you have animated any elements on a slide, these methods advance the animation, and do not necessarily move to the next slide. For example, if you have animated your bulleted list so that the bullets appear one at a time, then any of the actions in this list make the next bullet appear, rather than making the next slide appear. Only after all of the objects on the current slide have displayed does PowerPoint advance to the next slide. If you need to immediately advance to the next slide, you can use the instructions in the section, "Jumping to Specific Slides," later in this chapter.

To back up to the previous slide, use any of these methods:

• Press any of these keys: P, Backspace, left arrow, up arrow, or Page Up.

• Click the left-pointing arrow button on the bottom-left corner of the slide.

• Right-click and then choose Previous.

You can also go back to the last slide that you viewed. To do this, right-click and choose Last Viewed. Although you would think that the last slide viewed would be the same as the previous slide, this is not always the case. For example, if you jump around in the slide show-such as to a hidden slide-then the last slide viewed is not the previous slide in the show but the hidden slide that you have just viewed.

Jumping to Specific Slides

There are several ways to jump to a particular slide. One of the easiest ways is to select the slide by its title. To do so, follow these steps:

1. During the slide show, right-click to display the shortcut menu.

2. Select Go to Slide. A submenu appears, listing the titles of all of the slides in the presentation, as shown in Figure 20.4. Parentheses around the slide numbers indicate hidden slides.

   
   Figure 20.4: You can go to a specific slide using the Go to Slide command on the menu.

3. Click the slide title to which you want to jump.

EXPERT TIP 

The slide titles in this list come from title placeholders. If you want to show text on the list here but you don't want it to appear on the slide, type it in a title placeholder and then drag the placeholder off the edge of the slide, so it doesn't show in Slide Show view.

You can also jump to a certain slide number by typing this number and pressing Enter. For example, to go to the third slide, you would type 3 and then press Enter. Another way is to press Ctrl+S to open an All Slides dialog box listing the titles of all of the slides in the presentation. You can click a slide to select it and then click Go To, as shown in Figure 20.5.

Figure 20.5: The All Slides dialog box lists the titles of all of the slides so that you can select the one that you want to go to.

To jump back to the first slide in the presentation, hold down both the left-and right-mouse buttons for two seconds (or type 1 and press Enter).

Blanking the Screen

Sometimes during a live presentation there may be a delay. Whether it is a chatty audience member with a complicated question, a fire drill, or just an intermission, you will want to pause the show.

If you have the slides set for manual transition, then whichever slide you stopped on remains on the screen until you resume. However, you may not want this. For example, it may be distracting to the audience, especially if the pause is to allow someone to get up and speak in front of the screen. A solution is to turn the screen into a blank expanse of black or white. To do so, type W or a comma (for white), or B or a period (for black). To return to the presentation, you can press the same key, or press any key on the keyboard.

EXPERT TIP 

While the screen is completely black or white, you can draw on it with the Pen tool so that it becomes a convenient "scratch pad." Any annotations that you make with the pen on the blank screen are not saved; when you resume the presentation, they are gone forever.