Its Showtime: Taking a Presentation on the Road

It’s Showtime: Taking a Presentation on the Road

Tablet PC really shines when it comes to giving your presentation. That’s because Tablet PC is light and portable so you don’t throw out your back getting it to your presentation site.

It has wireless capability, so you can connect it to wireless display devices, and you can even use the Tablet PC screen to make more intimate presentations, such as a sales presentation to a buyer in her 8’ x 8’ cubicle. And Windows XP for Tablet PC even adds some on-screen notation and navigation tools available to make the presentation itself go smoothly.

Connecting the Tablet PC to an LCD

Anybody who has ever made a presentation — or attended one — has experienced that tense five minutes before the scheduled start time, when the AV guy from the hotel, the speaker who went before you, and a waiter who happened to walk by at the wrong time with fresh coffee, huddle over the display equipment trying to get some kind of image to project. When an image does appear, it’s upside down.

When you get it right-side up, it suddenly gets red and black lines across it.

I can’t tell you that those episodes will go away entirely, but the capability to connect without wires is truly a leap forward for presenter-kind. Every Tablet PC model has wireless capability (although some may require an optional wireless card to go wireless). Most are WiFi 802.11b compliant, and some use Bluetooth technology.

 Tip  Check your user manual if you want to see which you have, though the actually functionality won’t vary.

With a wireless connection, you don’t have to worry about the connector between your Tablet PC and the display equipment pulling out in the middle of the presentation or whether there’s enough cord so that you don’t actually have to balance Tablet PC on top of your head in order to connect. You just line up the infrared element of your Tablet PC (as shown in Figure 11-10) with the infrared element on the projector, and they communicate harmoniously. Ahh.

Figure 11-10: The ViewSonic Tablet PC V1100 sports an infrared port on its side.

 Tip  There’s a little more to it than that, of course, because the projector and your Tablet PC probably vary slightly in how they set up the wireless connection. Many projectors have a presentation-management feature that walks you through the setup by pushing buttons on the unit or a remote control, for example.

Presentation products, such as Panasonic’s PT series (www.panasonic.com), enable you to insert a wireless LAN card in the portable projector and then accept computer transmissions from up to 125 feet away.

 Tip  If you encounter a nonwireless projection system, you can usually use your Tablet PC USB port to connect.

Navigating through your show

When you run a slide show, you want everything to go as smoothly as possible, right? You don’t want to go back two slides when you meant to move for-ward one. You don’t want to appear like a parody of some clown trying to show the slides of his vacation in Atlantic City in his basement. So you need to know the easiest, simplest ways to move around your slide presentation.

Traditionally, the user has a few different ways to navigate through a PowerPoint slide show — click the mouse, press Enter, or press the right-arrow key on the keyboard to move forward one slide. Tablet PC provides a few new methods:

• Instead of clicking your mouse button, you can tap the screen with your pen to move forward one slide.

• You can use the right and left arrows on the Input Panel to move forward or backward by one slide.

• You can use voice commands such as Enter, Move Right, and Next to move forward one slide, Move Left to move back one slide, and End Show to end the slide show.

Follow these steps to navigate through a slide show:

1. Open a PowerPoint presentation that contains at least three slides (or open a blank one and insert two new slides, entering any text you like on each).

2. Tap the Slide Show view icon in the bottom-left corner of the PowerPoint screen to begin the show.

3. Tap your pen on the screen.

   The show moves forward one slide.

4. Display the Input Panel by tapping the Input Panel icon on the Windows taskbar.

   The Input Panel appears.

5. Tap the left arrow on the Quick Key pad.

   You move back one slide.

6. Choose ToolsðSpeech to activate the Speech function.

7. Tap the Command button.

8. Say, “Enter.”

   The presentation moves forward one slide.

9. Say, “End Show.”

   The show ends, and you are returned to PowerPoint’s main screen.

Adding ink while you speak

In its last few versions, PowerPoint has had a Pen tool (well, actually a pen-like drawing function that you control with the mouse) that you could use during a slide show to mark on the screen or even write words.

Of course, writing words with your mouse made them look a little bit like they were written by an ancient Egyptian with bad handwriting — hieroglyphics for the penmanship challenged. And all you could do was turn the pen on and off and change the color of ink it wrote in.

Windows XP for Tablet PC, with its pen technology, changes that. You can write on your tablet during a presentation in natural handwriting with your pen, circling things, highlighting them, writing notes in the margins, and so on. Just don’t go so crazy that all your audience sees is a big mess of scribbles!

But beyond the much more user-friendly functionality of writing with a pen instead of a mouse, you’ve also got a few more Pen tools available to you. You can access these on the Slide Show menu that you can display while running a show (as shown in Figure 11-11). By using this menu, you can also erase part or all of what you’ve written — on the fly.

Figure 11-11: Ballpoint, felt tip, highlighter — pick your pen style and start writing.

Follow these steps to use the Pen feature while showing a presentation:

1. Tap the Slide Show View icon in the bottom-left corner of PowerPoint to begin a slide show.

   The Slide Show view appears.

2. Either use the right-tap button on your pen to right-tap the slide area or tap the Slide Show menu icon (which appears at the bottom-left of the screen).

   The Slide Show menu is displayed.

3. Choose the Ballpoint pen style.

   The menu disappears and a small Ink toolbar appears.

4. Tap the Pen Color button on the toolbar and choose a blue color.

5. Use your pen to write some text on the slide (as shown in Figure 11-12).

   
   Figure 11-12: You can change the ink color of any of the three pen styles from the Ink toolbar.

6. Tap the Pointer button on the Ink toolbar.

   The toolbar disappears.

7. Either use the right-tap button on your pen to right-tap the slide area or tap the Slide Show menu icon that appears at the bottom-left of the screen to display the Slide Show menu again and choose Highlighter.

   Again the menu disappears, and the Ink toolbar appears.

8. Drag your pen across a piece of text to highlight it.

9. Display the slide show menu again and choose the Eraser.

   The menu disappears.

10. Rub your pen across a portion of your handwriting (created in Step 5) to erase it.

11. To end the slide show, right-tap the screen and choose End Show from the Slide Show menu.

    A dialog box appears, asking if you want to keep the ink you added to your slides.

12. Tap Yes to save the ink, and it will appear on your slides in Normal view from then on, or tap No to discard the ink — but this discards all of it!

By using a combination of pens and colors, you can make quite a colorful contribution to your presentation while it’s in progress.

 Tip  You can also enter text in Meeting Minder and Speaker Notes by choosing either of those options from the slide show menu available while you’re running a show. For these, however, you have to use the Input Panel to enter text — no handwriting.

Changing the display orientation

On convertible model Tablet PCs, such as the Acer TravelMate C100, you can turn your computer screen 180 degrees, so that you are sitting at the keyboard while somebody sitting across from you is viewing your monitor.

This is a great feature for sales calls, for example, where you’re presenting information on your products to a single person or a few people in a more intimate setting.

How you unlatch and spin your display away from you will vary slightly, depending on your unit.

For example, the Toshiba Portege 3500 allows you to swivel the screen in every direction (which is excellent for presentations) and lay it flat for writing. You can get a product tour at the Toshiba Web site (www.toshiba.com). Simply click the Portables link and then click the Portege link for detailed information. Or you can get to the Portege product page directly at

 www.csd.toshiba.com/cgi-bin/tais/pc/pc_tabletPcDetail.jsp?comm=CS  

 Remember  No matter how your Tablet PC works, always take care with this process, because wrenching the monitor portion of your unit with too much strength, or turning the monitor the wrong way, can damage your unit. In addition, some models require that the top of your clamshell style unit be at a particular angle, or you may damage your keyboard when you turn the monitor.

But these cautions aside, after you try the simple process of converting your monitor to present to others, you’ll find that this feature actually makes your Tablet PC into a handy little one-on-one presentation device.