Tuesday, 19 October 2004
nifty powerpoint feature
On the rare occasions that I use Powerpoint in the classroom, I generally have my computer set to mirror the display on the projection unit—so I see the same thing on my laptop as the students do on the wall screens.
Today, however, I was previewing some slides while my computer was hooked up to an external monitor, and I discovered an awesome feature of the current version of Powerpoint for the Mac. On my external monitor, I got the expected slide display. But on my laptop monitor, I got this nifty screen:
Very, very cool. I get a timer in the top left corner, the surrounding slides on the left so I can see where I am in the presentation, any notes associated with the slide at the bottom, an “up next” version of the slide so I’ll know what happens if/when I click, and clearly visible arrows to click to move forward or backwards through the presentation. Color me impressed.
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I know I know I know I know! I just discovered that at AoIR and was reduced to WOW! I mean, it's obvious, really, that this is what we need, but I never had it before!
:)
Hey Liz,
there was a piece on BBC Radio 4 the other day about powerpoint. It's very funny, especially Churchill's speeches in Powerpoint format ;)
So, how do you turn on this feature? What is it called??? How cool!
--teri
You don't have to do anything to turn it on, other than have your laptop connected to an external display device (monitor or projector). If you *don't* have mirroring on, when you go into presentation mode the external monitor will display the slides as expected, but the local monitor will show the presentation aids. Very slick. I have no idea if it works this way in the PC version, though.
Thanks so much, Liz! I'll have to check it out!
--teri
Liz, it's called Presenter View, and it does work on PCs. That said, I never knew about this until you wrote it up!
It also works in Keynote.
Which tends to look better and work more smoothly, of course....
:)
Actually I've never had any problems with Powerpoint, and it's never done jagged edges on my fonts either - does Keynote really look better? I mean, so long as you actually design your own slides and don't just default to bullets, Powerpoint can look pretty much however you want it to.
I never switched because Keynote, last I checked, can't do links from objects on slides to websites or other programs, and I use that feature of Powerpoint quite a lot. When I use Powerpoint. Oh, and I had other stuff to spend my $99 on, too.
I just gave a presentation today and managed to find the same screen on my PC. The only thing that gave me fits was one page had a link, to a demo, that wouldn't work from the presenter view. This meant I had to awkwardly mouse about screen 2 (projected behind me) to make pop up the right web page. I should have practiced that bit ahead of time. There is probably some way around it no doubt. Anyway, that for making me aware that something like this even existed, otherwise I wouldn't have gone poking through the help to find it.
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