Rehearsing Slides

Quick reference

• 00:05 Before you deliver your presentation to an audience, it's so
• 00:08 important that you practice, practice, practice.
• 00:10 And then practice some more or as many times as you have available.
• 00:13 Within PowerPoint, there are some more options that are available that can help
• 00:18 you rehearse your slide show as well as other options and features.
• 00:21 On the Slide Show tab, we have the Set Up Show button,
• 00:24 which launches the appropriate dialog box and that's the subject of another video.
• 00:29 There is also the option to rehearse timings so
• 00:31 it's worth having a look at that as well and we'll have a look at that, as well.
• 00:35 If you click on it, it's a way that you can deliver your presentation to practice
• 00:40 it, as well as to get the timings for slides to use later on.
• 00:43 And as you advance through your presentation it will give you the total
• 00:47 time when you end it, now please note that no sound is being recorded while you
• 00:51 do this and no video is being created.
• 00:53 It's just the slide and the animation timings that are being recorded, so
• 00:58 let's go into it and we can look at the buttons on the tool bar.
• 01:01 Now note the little button to advance the slide or you can just click on the slide.
• 01:06 Pause the recording, the slide time, as well as over here the title
• 01:10 presentation time based on where you currently are in your rehearsal,
• 01:15 as well as the repeat slide option.
• 01:17 When you slides are done what you press Esc to end the rehearsal,
• 01:21 you're given the option to keep the timings for your whole slideshow.
• 01:26 I click Yes and let's go to Slide Sorter view, and
• 01:29 we can look at the timings that are available for that presentation.
• 01:32 Also, remember that when you rehearse your presentation,
• 01:35 the timings are overwritten each time.
• 01:37 So if you wanna keep previous timings,
• 01:39 you must save your presentation with a new name.
• 01:42 Also, remember it's very very important, that you must remove those timings
• 01:47 when you need to use the slides in front of a live audience.
• 01:51 Otherwise the speaker may be on a particular slide and the slides
• 01:54 themselves, may move off to another slide, causing a bit of an embarrassing goof up.
• 01:58 I've seen that happen.
• 02:00 Another option is to actually record the slide show,
• 02:03 and here you have the option to commence recording
• 02:05 from the beginning of the presentation or from the current slide.
• 02:09 The difference between rehearsing the timings and recording a slide show,
• 02:13 is that when you rehearse the timings you can only save the slide and
• 02:16 the animation timings.
• 02:17 But when you record a slide show, you do those,
• 02:20 as well as recording the narration plus any laser pointer activity.
• 02:24 Now this laser pointer activity is actually what you do within PowerPoint's
• 02:28 built-in laser,
• 02:29 and of course not anything that you'd do with an external laser pointer.
• 02:33 And we can demonstrate that quickly in slide show mode by right-clicking on
• 02:37 the slides > Pointer Options > Laser Pointer and
• 02:40 any movements that we make with the pointer are also recorded.
• 02:43 We can start recording the presentation runs, and
• 02:47 the information is recorded for that, very useful.
• 02:51 So on the slide, we talk about databases, and support the decision-making,
• 02:56 etc, then we move to the chart of performance upgrades and
• 03:01 a SmartArt diagram about the future, and that also gets recorded.
• 03:05 Notice also that you can activate a microphone and also a webcam
• 03:09 if your computer has one, and a set of buttons to turn them on and off.
• 03:14 That's a fairly new feature for this version of PowerPoint.
• 03:18 Notice how PowerPoint also has these icons on slides, you can see that each icon
• 03:22 effectively represents a very small sound file that's embedded in the presentation,
• 03:27 and we can see the sound timeline, and we can play that back if we wish.
• 03:31 And we can get some sound back from that file replaying back to us some of
• 03:35 the audio that we just captured.
• 03:37 So in summary, it's very important to rehearse your presentation,
• 03:40 it's even useful to record your presentation with audio and
• 03:43 camera if you wish, and listen to yourself and watch yourself and
• 03:46 see if you can learn anything about how you present.
• 03:48 You might focus on particular words that you wish you didn't say, such as cool, and
• 03:52 it's only through good practice and listening and
• 03:54 watching that you learn how to present more effectively, as well as of course
• 03:58 feedback from the audience if people are kind enough to do that for you.
• 04:01 The confidence that you will gain will allow you to pace your presentation, to
• 04:05 know what information you're presenting, as well as to handle interruptions and
• 04:09 possible questions, and practice will give you so much confidence and
• 04:13 some of these controls in PowerPoint are perfect to help you get that practice and
• 04:16 gain that confidence.
• 04:18 It's also very important to use if you wanna distribute
• 04:23 your presentation with voiceover so that's quite important too.

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