Rehearsing Slides

Quick reference

• 00:03 Before you deliver your presentation to the audience, it’s so important that you practice, practice, practice, practice and practice with as
• 00:10 much time as you have available, and within PowerPoint there are some options that are available that can help you rehearse your
• 00:16 slideshow as well as other options and features. On the slideshow tab we have the set up show button which launches the appropriate dialog
• 00:24 box which is the subject of another video. There is also the option to rehearse timings and it’s well worth having a look at. If you click on it, it’s
• 00:32 a way that you can deliver your presentation, to practice it, as well as to get the timings for slides. And as you advance through your
• 00:40 presentation it will give you the total time when you end it. Now please note that no sound is being recorded while you do this and no video is
• 00:47 being created. It’s just the slide and the animation timings that are being recorded. So let’s go into it and we can look at the buttons on
• 00:56 the toolbar. Now note the little button to advance the slide, or you can just click on the slide. Pause the recording, the slide time, as well as
• 01:07 over here the total presentation time, based on where you currently are in the rehearsal, as well as the repeat slide option. When your slides are
• 01:15 done or when you press the ESC key to end the rehearsal, you’re given the option to keep those timings for your whole slideshow. I click yes,
• 01:24 and let’s go to slide sorter view and we can look at the timings that are available for that presentation. Also remember that when you
• 01:33 rehearse your presentation, the timings are overwritten each time, so if you want to keep previous timings, you must save your
• 01:40 presentation with a new name. Also remember, and it’s very, very important, you must remove those timings when you need to use those
• 01:48 slides in front of a live audience, because otherwise the speaker may be on a particular slide and the slides themselves may move off to
• 01:56 another slide, causing a bit of an embarrassing goof up. I’ve seen it happen. Another option is to actually record the slideshow and here you have
• 02:06 the option to commence recording from the beginning of the presentation, or from the current slide. The difference between rehearsing the
• 02:14 timings and recording a slideshow is that when you rehearse the timings you only save the slide and animation timings but when you record a
• 02:22 slideshow, you do those as well as recording the narration plus any laser pointer activity. Now this laser pointer activity is actually what you do with
• 02:31 PowerPoint’s built-in laser pointer and of course not anything that you do with an external laser pointer. And we can demonstrate that quickly in
• 02:39 slideshow mode, by right clicking on the slide, pointer options and laser pointer and any movements that we make with that pointer are
• 02:49 also recorded. So we start the recording, the presentation runs and the information is recorded and that very useful so on slide 2 we
• 02:59 talk about databases and support for decision making, et cetera, then we move to the chart of performance upgrades and a SmartArt diagram
• 03:10 about the future and that all gets recorded. Notice how that PowerPoint has these icons on slides now that we’ve exited so when I go back
• 03:21 to normal view we can see that each icon represents effectively a very small sound file. And we can see the sound timeline and we can
• 03:28 play that if we wish, and we can get some sound back from that file replaying back to us some of the audio that was just captured. So in
• 03:38 summary, it’s so important to rehearse your presentation. It’s even useful to record your presentation with your audio and listen to
• 03:46 yourself to see if you can learn anything about how you present. You may focus on particular words that you wish you didn’t say, such as
• 03:52 cool, and it’s only through practice and listening and watching that you learn how to present more effectively, as well as of course, feedback
• 04:00 from the audience if people are kind enough to do that to you. The confidence that you will gain will allow you to pace your presentation, to know
• 04:07 what information you’re presenting, as well as to handle interruptions and possible questions, and practice will give you so much confidence and
• 04:15 some of these controls in PowerPoint are perfect to help you to get that practice and gain that confidence.

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