Chapter 20: Preparing for a Live Presentation

It's show time! Well, actually I hope for your sake that it is not time for the show this very instant, because things will go much more smoothly if you can practice using PowerPoint's slide-show controls before you have to go live.

Presenting the show can be as simple or as complex as you make it. At the most basic level, you can start the show, move through it slide-by-slide with simple mouse-clicks or key presses, and then end the show. However, to take advantage of PowerPoint's extra slide-show features, you should spend a little time studying the following sections. The first part of this chapter assumes that you are showing your presentation on a PC that has PowerPoint 2007 installed; sections later in this chapter discuss other situations.

Starting and Ending a Show

To start a show, do any of the following:

• Click the Slide Show View button in the bottom-right corner of the screen.

• On the View tab, click Slide Show.

• Press F5.

• Press Shift+F5

These methods are not all exactly alike. For example, if you click the Slide Show View button in the bottom-right corner, or press Shift+F5, the first slide to appear is the currently selected one in PowerPoint. If you click the Slide Show button on the View tab or press F5, it starts with the first slide in the presentation, regardless of which slide was selected.

Once the show is underway, you can control the movement from slide to slide as described in the section, "Moving from Slide to Slide."

To end the show, do any of the following:

• Right-click and choose End Show.

• Press Esc, − (minus), or Ctrl+Break.

If you want to temporarily pause the show while you have a discussion, you can blank the screen by pressing W or , (comma) for a white screen, or B or . (period) for a black screen. To resume the show, press any key.

EXPERT TIP 

If you set up the slide transitions to occur automatically at a certain time, you can stop or restart the show by pressing S or + (plus sign). However, this is more of an issue for self-running shows, which are discussed in Chapter 21.