You can use your favorite social network to register or link an existing account:
Or use your email address to register without a social network:
Sign in with these social networks:
Or enter your username and password
Forgot your password?
Yes, please link my existing account with for quick, secure access.
No, I would like to create a new account with my profile information.
Tips
How-to
News
Videos
Stories
I’m going to make a wild guess here. You’re probably reading the PowerPoint and Office Art blog because you’re looking for ways to make your presentations and other documents look better. But you may not know that PowerPoint has some features that are specifically designed to make you look better!
Talking in front of an audience scares most people. One of the reasons PowerPoint is a popular application is that it supports you during your speech. PowerPoint keeps you on track with supporting information, and makes it easy to add illustrations and diagrams that help your audience follow your reasoning. But PowerPoint can also be an an invisible partner; secretly providing you with tips and hints during your speech. This partner, this collection of features, are all assembled in a window called Presenter View.
The concept of Presenter View has been knocking around since Office ’97. The most recent iteration is available today in PowerPoint 2003, and it’s a pretty good feature.
Presenter View hasn’t gotten a real makeover for several releases – it was overdue on that account. Additionally, we’ve gotten a lot of user feedback on the feature, and collected some good ideas on how to make it even more useful. Still, many people who have already discovered Presenter View love it and use it regularly to good effect.
Of course you can use Presenter View in PowerPoint 2003, it's just a little tricky to get going (one of the things we're working on now!) Here's a quick run-through on using it today.
Because Presenter View requires two monitors, you’ll need to be using a laptop that can hook up to an external monitor, or a desktop with a video card that can support two monitors. A typical configuration is a recent model laptop, with a projector connected to the external monitor port.
The command to turn Presenter View is located under the Slideshow menu, in the Setup Show dialog. The Multiple Monitors section includes a checkbox to Show Presenter View. You can also choose which of your monitors will display the slide show, the other will be used for the Presenter View dialog.
I’ll avoid turning this into a PowerPoint 2003 tutorial by directing you to the Question mark icon at the top of the Setup Show dialog. That button launches a help screen that includes a topic “Running a presentation on two monitors.” Reading that should help you get up and running with the current version of Presenter View.
So, this is already a cool and useful feature. How could we improve on that for Office 2007?
It’s particularly painful when we spend a ton of development time on a feature we know will solve a real customer problem, but for some reason the customer just isn’t aware of it’s existence. Presenter View tends to be just such a feature because its “hidden” in a dialog that most people just don’t open. If they do open the dialog, they often don't notice Presenter View because is is typically a disabled control, because their system isn’t currently set up to support a second screen.
If you’ve been reading other posts in this blog, or articles about Office 2007 in general, you’ve probably jumped right to the solution to this problem; The new Office 2007 Ribbon. The ribbon puts all the commands at surface level; a series of tabbed controls laid out in ribbons, each aligned with a general task, like writing, designing, reviewing, etc. No surprise that in PowerPoint, one of our ribbons is called Slide Show. And that ribbon clearly displays the controls that let you easily set up and activate Presenter View.
The Presenter View command will help set up your monitors by opening the Windows Displays control panel, and simultaneously displaying a help pane with advice and guidance. Once you’re properly configured, launching slide show will put your presentation on one of your monitors (usually a large monitor or projector) and display the new Presenter View on your private display, such as your laptop.
And here's what you'll see... minus those red number dots of course.
Let’s walk through the new and improved features:
1) Slide notes: each slide has it’s own set of notes. Use those as you would any good set of crib notes for the speech.
2) Zoom control: Make your notes as large or small as you like. Easier to read or more on the screen - you choose.
3) Sizeable window: You can make the Presenter View window smaller, like any normal window, which gives you access to other applications, folders, or items on your desktop during the presentation, again out of sight of the audience.
4) Slide thumbnails: “What’s coming up on the next slide?” “Where’s that slide with the pie chart? I need to show that one again to answer an audience question!” The thumbnails provide information on where you are in the presentation, and gives you one-click navigation to any slide in the presentation.
5) Time and duration display: “What time is it?” “How long have I been talking?” One of the big mistakes presenters make is losing track of time. Now, its always right there in front of you.
6) Any pane, any size: The panes are adjustable – if you want larger thumbnails, smaller slide display, and more room for notes, just move the borders around and you’ve got it your way!
7) Oversized navigation controls: When you’re concentrating on talking, it helps to have larger buttons. They’re easier to hit when your mouse starts shaking for no good reason…
Presenter View is an incredible aid to anyone trying to add a bit more professionalism to their presentations. The benefits are numerous:
You have private details that the audience cannot see: This lets you look like you’ve got many more details memorized. There’s no fumbling about with loose sheets of papers or notebooks – the details you need are displayed with the slide you’re discussing.
You know what’s coming up: A common presentation mistake is to cover the next slide’s content while on the prior slide, and then when you advance to that slide, realizing you have nothing left to say. Awkward. The thumbnails give you context in the presentation, reminding you what you’ve covered, as well as what’s next.
You can go anywhere, smoothly, quickly: The same thumbnails give you one-click access to any slide in the presentation. If you need to go back to a prior slide, you go there quickly and easily. And you return the same way. It feels like magic. You look like a pro.
Look your audience in the eye – or appear to be doing so: One of the fatal sins of presenting is the speaker who spends too much time looking over their shoulder reading slide information to the audience. The less you look, the better you look. It’s true!
There’s no doubt that this is our best Presenter View ever. But, we still have lots of ideas on how we could improve it, and other ways in which it could be used in the future. What are they? Well, that’s a topic for another day. For now, we’re focused on getting this version finished and into your hands. And of course, we're always interested in hearing your feedback.
Ric Bretschneider6/26/2006
Comments: (16) Collapse
Excellent post! I truly never new of such an existing feature. Thanks! and - keep it up!!
Isn't this www.bretschneider.us/.../Ribbon.PNG a post-beta2 ribbon?
Sharp eye. Yes, indeed it is, and you'll note some new design in the Presenter View itself over the beta release. Hope you like the improvments! Ric Bretschneider
I can't install a second monitor on my virtual machine (bummer), so I've been unable to check this out. Thanks for posting about it. Very helpful. How does one navigate in the slide thumbnails strip? I'd expect to see a slider or some arrows or something there. Can we make the slide thumbnails smaller, but within the same space? I mean, I don't want to make the actual thumbnail space smaller, but I do want to see more slide thumbnails, so I'd like to make the thumbnails themselves smaller. Is that doable? Resizable notes is a huge bonus. Thanks for that.
i love the olf feature of navigating directly to a desired slide, by just keying in the slide-number and pressing enter. i notice that this feature is not applicable in the Presentere View. how can this feature be incorporated into the Presenter View? i am currently using Powerpoint 2003. thanks.
To answer Echo's question (Hey Echo!) about navigating the thumbnail strip, yes you caught a blooper in the screen capture. The scroll bar got moved down beneath the task bar, so it appears to be missing. The thumbnails resize depending on the height of that pane. Sounds like I didn't make that clear enough, all three panes resize; thumbnail and slide have a minimum size, but the notes pane can be shrunk down to no width, helpful if you don't have notes in the presentation as you now have a larger area for the active slide. Thanks! Ric Bretschneider
7/3/2006
Answering Ben G's question: Oh! But going directly to a slide by typing its number is supported while you’re using Presenter view! You just need to know a secret about how Windows works. The Windows operating system has a concept of an active Window; the window where work is currently being done. In this case, the presenter view is active, so you can use the tab key to move about on controls, and space to select the control with the focus rectangle, etc. Unfortunately, the Presenter View doesn't know what to do when you type the number of a slide and press enter. However, you can move your mouse pointer over to the presentation window and click once to make that active. Then type your slide number and press return. There's another way to do this without even using the mouse. You can use Alt-Tab window navigation to make the Presentation active and then type your number and press enter. You'll probably only want to do that when the Presenter View monitor is you primary one, that way the Alt-Tab list will be displayed on your private monitor, and not shown to your audience. Typing the slide number is a powerful technique that can be used to very good effect when you're taking questions from the audience and need to move quickly to a slide that supports your answer. It does require a good memory about what slide contains the content you need. This reminds me of a tip; While in slideshow, pressing the F1 key will give you a list of keyboard commands available during a slideshow. Mastering these will make you a real PowerPoint magician! Thanks very much for asking. Ric Bretschneider 7/3/2006
Great - long awaited improvement! I use a logitech cordless presenter to drive my presentations, but for some odd reason the key mappings in the 2003 presenter view are different to the the slide control keys in the single monitor view. The logitech device outputs the page up/down control, which drives the slides forwards/backwards in the standard view, but scrolls the notes up and down in the presenter view.
Could the same key mappings be used in the new presenter view?
I have a problem with the Beta 2.... Occasionally when I close the slideshow (while using Presenter view) the computer freezes. Nothing responds, not Ctrl-Alt-Delete or Ctrl-Shift-Esc. Is this a known problem? Will it be fixed in the official release? Also, when I have presenter view open, it overlaps slightly with the second monitor, so you get a small blue bar down the left/right of the presentation screen....
Reply to Dale: Hi Dale. Thanks for bringing this up. Finding crashes and other problems is one of the major reasons we do Beta releases. I'll forward your symptoms along to our test department. I haven't seen this myself, and I'm a big user of Presenter View, but internally we've done many more releases since Beta2 and lots of bugs have been fixed. While we're on the subject, you and everyone else who is using the betas, can help us out greatly. When any Office application has a problem and asks you if it can send information back to Microsoft, please do so! This is one of the biggest contributions you can make towards helping us create stable applications. Ric Bretschneider 7-12-2006
To Dieter: Thanks Dieter. I suspect I can give you a work-around for your cordless control problem. After you start the slideshow, use your mouse to click *once* in the slide show monitor (not the Presenter View monitor). That will set the Windows focus on the slide show, and the instructions from the remote device will be sent to that window and advance your slides using the page-down keystroke. Presenter view will still keep pace with your presentation, and you'll only need to shift the focus back to that monitor if you want to jump to another slide or scroll the text in your notes pane. Thanks, Ric Bretschneider 7-12-2006
Can we add a button or a toolbar to presenter's view. I couldn't find any VBA objects to deal with in presenter's view. Please help.
Thanks
Since many laptops are widescreen now, wouldn't it make sense to allow the thumbnails to be arranged vertically like they were in 2003? That would make better use of the space on the local screen. Where did the "next slide title" information go? It was in 2003 right under the main slide and was useful for determining what animation would play next. On that subject, how about showing the next slide exactly as it will appear? In other words, if there's an animation that adds bullet points, let me see the current slide and the next slide (with the upcoming bullet) so I know what I'm about to present. My problem is that the slides that I present aren't just bullet points, they have callouts (groups of text boxes and arrows) that pop up and disappear with each mouse click.
Hello Alex and Jeff, Alex: Extension of the presenter view toolbar is not supported. Sorry, but it wasn't a goal this release. Jeff: Good points. This release represents a significant redesign of the Presenter View, and we try to take design enhancements in stages. Sometimes that means we remove or change existing function, usually servicing that need in another way. You do make good points. Similar to Jeff's comment, additional user customization of this view is an obvious enhancement that will be researched and evaluated for consideration in future versions. And since you mention it, I'd take an opportunity to point out Howard's "Take a Walk on the Wide Slide" post ( blogs.msdn.com/.../634290.aspx ) which touches on the enhancements we've made for wide screen monitors. Thanks for the comments! Ric Bretschneider 8/2/2006
Hi, I am still using Powerpoint 2003, unfortunately my work has not upgraded yet! I love the presenter view concept and just started using it, its great! However sometimes I find that the notes pages do not update as you go from say slide 15 to slide 16. i.e. the notes typed in for slide 15 appear on the notes for slide 16. Is there something I am doing wrong here? Thanks
Andrew
Comments: (loading) Collapse