The further you get into developing your presentation, the more helpful it is to know how to manage
and review your slides. You might be surprised by everything PowerPoint has to offer, including
ways to practice your presentation and take notes.
First, this view should be familiar to you - a place to work with slides, a place to
edit your presentation. This is the Normal view, and it's one of four views that you
can access at the bottom of the PowerPoint window.
The other slide views include Slide Sorter, which displays all of your slides in miniature.
Here you can easily drag and drop slides to re-order them.
Next is the Reading View. This fills most of your screen with a preview of your presentation,
leaving room for navigation buttons here.
Finally, we have the Slide Show View, which completely fills the screen with what the
audience will see when you present. There's a handy menu in the bottom left corner that
appears only when you hover over it, allowing you to navigate the slides, and access other
features that can help you during your presentation. Alternatively, you can use certain keys on
your keyboard to advance the slides, including the arrow keys; Page Up and Page Down; the
space bar; and Enter. To end the slide show, just press Esc on your keyboard.
PowerPoint gives you lots of ways to review and fine-tune your slides. Have you ever written
a project outline for work or school? I think you'll like this feature. The Outline tab,
which you can access in the left pane, lets you view the text from your slides in outline
form. This is a great place to review your presentation, and make changes to the text.
Another thing I like to do at this point is organize my slides into sections to make them
easier to navigate on the Slides tab. This is sort of a two-part presentation - we have
dogs, then we have cats and other small pets - so I think I'd like create a section for
each. Let me show you how it works. Start by selecting the slide that you want to begin
your first section. Then click the Section command, and Add Section. To rename it while
it's still selected, I'm just going to click the command again, and choose Rename Section.
Type the name here.
Now I'm going to repeat the process to create a second section that starts with this slide.
Now we can collapse and expand the sections by clicking the tiny arrow next to each section
name. This is a great way to organize your presentation according to changes in tone
or content, and display only the slides you're currently working with.
Thinking ahead to the day of my presentation, I'm starting to get some ideas - talking points
I'd like to jot down about the presentation and the pets that are being featured. Luckily,
PowerPoint has a place for that - two places, actually! The first is the Notes pane, located
at the bottom of the screen. The notes you enter here, also known as speaker notes, can
help you prepare, and can also be printed when it's time for you to present. First I'm
going to click and drag the edge of the pane to make it a little bigger. Now just click
the pane to type in your notes.
The second place you can enter and view speaker notes can be accessed all the way up here
on the View tab. In the group that contains the rest of the presentation views, all you
have to do is click Notes Page. Now you can review your slides and any notes you may have
entered already - zoom in if you need to. You can also type directly in the text box.
With so many ways to manage your slides - from speaker notes, to sections, to different slide
views - PowerPoint has everything you need to go beyond just giving a slide show to giving
a fully-realized presentation.