Viewing a Presentation

After you finish arranging your slides, adding transitions, and adding hyperlinks, you’re ready to test how your entire presentation looks. To view your entire presentation, follow these steps:

1. Click the Slide Show tab.

2. Click the From Beginning icon in the Start Slide Show group.

PowerPoint displays the first slide of your presentation. You can also choose the From Beginning command by pressing F5.

3. Choose one of the following:

• Click the mouse or press the spacebar to view the next slide. • Press Esc to exit your presentation. If you have a large presentation consisting of 300 slides, you may not want to view the first 290 slides just to test how your last 10 slides look. To avoid this problem, PowerPoint lets you choose to view your presentation starting with any slide. To view your presentation starting with a slide other than the first one, follow these steps:

1. Click the Slide Show tab.

2. Click the From Current Slide icon in the Start Slide Show group PowerPoint displays the currently displayed slide.

3. Choose one of the following: • Click the mouse or press the spacebar to view the next slide. • Press Esc to exit your presentation.

Creating a custom slide show

You may have a presentation organized for one audience (engineers and scientists) but need to give the same presentation to a different audience (sales executives). Although you could copy your original presentation and then modify it, now you’ll be stuck with two copies of the same information. And, if you modify the information in one presentation, you have to modify the same information in the second (or third or fourth) presentation. To avoid this problem, PowerPoint lets you create custom slide shows based on an existing presentation. Such a custom slide show can selectively show slides in a different order. To create a custom slide show, you need to define the order you want to display the slides. To arrange the order of a custom slide show, follow these steps:

1. Click the Slide Show tab.

2. Click the Custom Slide Show icon in the Start Slide Show group. A pull-down menu appears.

3. Choose Custom Shows.

4. Click New. The Define Custom Show dialog box appears.

5. Click in the Slide Show Name text box and type a name for your custom slide show.

6. Click a slide in the Slides in Presentation list box and then click the Add button.

This tells PowerPoint which existing slides you want to reuse in your custom slide show.

7. Repeat Step 6 for each slide you want to include in your custom slide show.

8. Click a slide in the Slides in Custom Show list box and click the Up or Down arrow button to rearrange their order.

9. Repeat Step 8 for each slide you want to rearrange in your custom slide show.

10. Click OK. The Custom Shows dialog box appears again.

11. Click the name of your custom slide show and then click Show. PowerPoint shows your new, customized presentation.

To present a custom slide show, follow these steps:

1. Click the Slide Show tab.

2. Click the Custom Slide Show icon in the Start Slide Show group. A pull-down menu appears that lists the names of all the custom slide shows you’ve created.

3. Click the name of the custom slide show you want to view.

4. Choose one of the following:

• Click the mouse or press the spacebar to view the next slide.

• Press Esc to exit your presentation.

Hiding a slide

PowerPoint can hide a slide, which lets you keep your slide but not display it during a presentation. Hiding a slide can be especially handy when you need to create a custom slide show and need a slide to appear only in the custom slide show but not the original presentation (or vice versa). To hide a slide, follow these steps:

1. Click the slide that you want to hide (in Slide or Outline view).

2. Click the Slide Show tab.

3. Click the Hide Slide icon in the Set Up group. PowerPoint dims your selected slide. To unhide a slide, just repeat the above three steps.

Organizing with Slide Sorter view

After you have a chance to view your presentation, you may want to rearrange or hide slides. To help you organize your presentation, switch to Slide Sorter view, which numbers each slide to show you the order that they appear.

To use Slide Sorter view, follow these steps:

1. Click the View tab.

2. Click the Slide Sorter view icon in the Presentation Views group.

3. (Optional) To delete a slide, click a slide and press Delete.

4. (Optional) To hide a slide, click a slide, click the Slide Show command tab, and click Hide Slide.

5. (Optional) To move a slide

a. Move the mouse pointer over a slide.

b. Hold down the left mouse button and move (drag) the mouse. PowerPoint displays a vertical line where it will place your slide.

c. Release the left mouse button.

6. Click the Normal icon in the Presentation Views group to switch out of Slide Sorter view.

Timing yourself

To help you practice giving a presentation, PowerPoint can time how long you’ve spent on each slide. Such timing can give you a rough idea of how long you want to keep each slide visible for an audience to see. No matter how hard you may practice, the timing of your presentation by yourself will almost never be exactly the timings of your actual presentation because people may ask questions, equipment may fail, distractions may occur when the waiter drops a plate, and so on. To time a presentation, follow these steps:

1. Click the Slide Show tab.

2. Click the Rehearse Timings icon in the Set Up group. PowerPoint displays the first slide of your presentation along with the Timing toolbar that shows you how long your current slide has been visible.

3. Click the mouse or press the spacebar to view each slide in your presentation.

Each time a new slide appears, the Timing toolbar records how long each slide remains visible.

4. Click Esc when you reach the end of your presentation. A dialog box appears, asking whether you want to keep the timings for each slide.

5. Click Yes or No. If you click Yes in Step 5, PowerPoint displays Slide Sorter view and lists the timings for each slide.

6. Click the Normal icon in the Start Slide Show group to switch out of Slide Sorter view.

Creating Handouts

When people view a particularly interesting presentation, they often want copies of that presentation so they can review the information later or have a place to jot down notes during the presentation itself. For that reason, PowerPoint lets you create handouts from your presentation. Handouts typically contain a thumbnail of each slide along with blank space for jotting down notes about the information presented by that slide. To create a handout, follow these steps:

1. Click the Office Button and choose Print -> Print Preview. The Print Preview window appears.

2. Click the Print What list box in the Page Setup group and choose a handout style, such as Handouts (3 Slides Per Page). The Print Preview window shows you what your handouts will look like.

3. Click the Print icon when you’re ready to print your handouts.

Packing Presentations to Go

Many people use their laptops to display their PowerPoint presentations, but occasionally, you may need to use a different computer to run your presentation. Because that other computer may not have a copy of PowerPoint, you can store your entire PowerPoint presentation on a CD that you can run on another computer. You can view your presentations only on a computer that uses Windows 2000, Windows XP, or Windows Vista. When you package a presentation on a CD, PowerPoint includes a strippeddown version of PowerPoint designed just to run and display presentations. You won’t be able to change your presentation.

To package up your presentation, follow these steps:

1. Click the Office Button and choose Send -> Publish for CD.

Rather than save a presentation to a CD, you can click the Copy to Folder button and specify a different drive and folder, such as a USB removable drive.

2. Click in the Name the CD text box and type a descriptive name for your presentation.

3. Insert a blank CD in your rewritable CD drive.

4. Click Copy to CD. If your presentation includes hyperlinks to other programs, PowerPoint displays a dialog box to alert you. This dialog box is meant to keep you from accidentally creating a presentation that could spread viruses or Trojan Horses.

5. Click Close.