Chill – I’ve included this trick because it’s very simple and illustrates how technical solutions can help even when we think they can’t and because most of the people who ask me for help about nerves cite making presentations as one of The Big Things they need help with. If presentations don’t freak you out, just skip this page! 🙂

This is about the only part of this training that applies only to presenting.

Presenter View – a simple technical trick

A simple setup showing the current and next slides, the time and duration. The white space at the bottom is typically used for the speaker’s notes.

Presenter View has existed for quite a while now in both PowerPoint and Keynote. As professional presenters and speakers we use it extensively. At its most simple, Presenter View is a way of setting up your laptop (or whatever you’re using) so that what it shows to the audience on the big screen is not the same as what it shows you on your screen. Instead it typically shows you (it can be customised, but the defaults are good) the following:

current slide – what the audience is looking at
next slide – what they’re going to see next, when you advance your slides
time – so you can tell how far you are from the coffee break etc!
running time – so you know how long you’ve been delivering the presentation
notes for the current slide.

There are huge advantages to using Presenter View, as I’m sure you can imagine, as well as the help it provides you for your nerves. For example, you can start to talk about what’s on the slide before it appears to the audience, or as the slides transition, which makes you look soooo much more cool than waiting for it to arrive and then starting to discuss it.

Important… Although it might be tempting, resist the urge to rely on Presenter View as a substitute for rehearsal, practice and knowing your material. It can help in a pinch, as it shows what’s coming up and provides notes, but trust me… it’s not a substitute.

There are some more thoughts on how useful Presenter View is on this download in PDF format.

Turning Presenter View on couldn’t be more simple: here’s what it looks like in PowerPoint: the password for this video is PV

Technical note…

If you want a little more detail about how to use Presenter View in Powerpoint, the Microsoft website has plenty of material: start here. If you’re using Keynote (the Mac equivalent) there’s an excellent tutorial about the software just here. The bit you’re interested in at the moment starts about 32 minutes in.