3.2 Presentation Aids

In this lesson, let's talk about what you can do to use PowerPoint as a presentation aid. There are tools and features that make it more comfortable to give your presentation. Lets take a look,. Historically, you may have use note cards or printed pages to keep your speaking notes about your presentation. But PowerPoint actually has a speaker notes feature that allows you to build in notes for each slide, digitally. To do that, let's make sure that we're in normal view, and then click on Notes, here, at the bottom of Powerpoint. This opens up the speaker notes panel. Down in this box, you can type and add your speaker notes, as you're seeing me do here. Adding the speaker notes here, will make them available in a variety of views as you'll seen with one of the next features. Speaker notes are added to each slide. I'll switched slides here, and you'll notice in the speaker's notes that this is a blank slate and we add our commentary on slide by slide basis. Each slide has its own speaker notes. Another key thing that you can add for giving a presentation, is basic animations, which I'll show you quickly now. The main use for animations is to phase in the elements of your slide that you wanna show. For example, if you have a compelling graph or chart, you can hide it at first and then animate it in. To do just that, I'll go ahead and click on the object that I want to animate. Now, let's go over to the Animate tab here, on PowerPoint's ribbon. With an object selected, all you need to do is click on one of these thumbnails to add an animation to that object. I like to stick to simple animations like fade, for example, so I'll choose that. You'll see that PowerPoint animates that object onto the slide. You can always click Preview to playback the animations and get a look at your slide. You could select other objects and add more animations as needed. This is a helpful tool for giving presentations, because you can kind of build suspense for your key points. Bring objects on in phases in order to add twist to your slide deck. Last up, I wanna share presenter view, one of my favorite tools in PowerPoint, and also one of the most underutilized. This combines all of the best tools and makes them available when you're presenting. To enter presenter view, let's start off by coming over to the Slideshow tab and ticking the box for Use Presenter View. Oftentimes, you'll be giving your presentation with multiple screens. Maybe you can see your own presentation on your laptop and the audience will see it on a large screen LCD display. When you use presenter view, you'll have a different view then your audience. Let's jump into that view by clicking on the presentation icon here, at the bottom. Now, right now this looks like standard view, so I'll need to swap the screens. The menu option is right up here and you can see now what presenter view does for us. This moved the regular presentation view over to my other monitor. First of all, the speaker notes that we added are all visible now. You can see them on your own screen while the audience will have the normal view of the presentation. This keeps your speaking cues nearby and easy to us and is much better than writing out note cards or ideas on paper. Finally, you can also jump around in your presentation to basically create custom slide shows. I'll click on this icon, and now you can see thumbnails for each of the slides in the deck. Your audience still won't see this, but I can click on any of the slides to jump directly to it. Basically, presenter view is your cockpit with the most useful tools, and your audience sees just the standard presentation. Next up, I'll show you some techniques to send and share your presentation with others. I'm Andrew Childers for Tuts Plus and thanks for joining me.