With sp1 installed, when you select “use presenter view” on the Slide Show tab of the Ribbon, whichever monitor is set to be your main display (the one with your Start menu and Taskbar on) will be assumed to be the one the presenter is looking at, while the slides will go on your second monitor.

This is usually the right decision and is much more likely to result in you getting the setup you need “right first time” without having to fiddle about to choose the right monitor from the list (although you can still select this by hand if you need to override the automatic choice, of course).

The Microsoft Office blog has an article about Producer for PowerPoint, as well as links to the download page, and importantly to the Office Animation Runtime which you will need if you have PowerPoint 2010 (previous versions installed this along with the application, whereas 2010 does not). What is strange here is that the download page describes this as version 2 with a release date of 29th April 2011, yet the actual download page and file is identical to the version released and announced at the beginning of May last year.

The previous release was really a bug fix version which sorted out compatibility for Office 2007 and 2010, and there were vague claims that there would be new features in some later release, although as always according to policy there were no specifics about software in development.

Producer is a great way to turn a presentation file into a polished multimedia show which anyone can view using their browser. This is great for e-learning, tutorials, or any situation where you want to take something which would normally be delivered in person and make it available to a wider audience.

Oddly enough the download page refers to this as version 2, but the program itself claims (through help > about) that it is build 3.0.3012.0, but the MD5 hash for this file is identical to the year-old one. I’ve had a couple of problems with it – for example if you delete a load of slides from the timeline it expands the last one to fill up the space, and when you try to shrink it back down it takes while for no obvious reason, in my case chewing up one of my four processor cores flat out for a couple of minutes (tip: only add slides when you know you need them rather than all at once to avoid this problem).

What does Presenter View offer?

Presenter View has been available in PowerPoint for nearly ten years, and allows you (the presenter) to see much more than the audience. Specifically, you will be able to see on your screen:

• the current slide exactly as the audience see it (and which stage of “building” the slide you are up to)
• your speaker notes to remind you of important points to say, and other facts to refer to in answering questions
• all of your slides (including hidden ones to remind you they are there), shown as a series of thumbnails across the bottom, rather like a film strip (down the side in 2002/3)
• slide <number> of <total slide count>
• the elapsed time
• the time of day (2007 onwards)
• access to tools such as pen and highlighter to draw on screen and annotate slides on the fly, again without turning around (2007 onwards)

This means that you can sit or stand facing your audience without needing to keep turning around to see the screen to know where you are up to (or far worse, to read it out to your audience). It can also help you to follow good practice and avoid including lots of things on your slides to remind you what to say, by making everything easily available in your notes section. This means you can remove lots of the words from your slides – or perhaps all of them, using only a picture to illustrate your topic.

One of the reasons it may be a well-kept secret is that it was quite basic in its first appearance in PowerPoint 2002 (aka PowerPoint XP) but was still a little clunky and inflexible – you could not change the size of the panes for example, so if you had very visual slides and lots of notes, you could not always see them properly. So even those who discovered or read about the feature may have soon given up on using it, and not passed on the idea to others. A screenshot of Presenter View from PowerPoint 2003 is shown below (click for larger version).

The whole layout was radically overhauled and made more flexible in 2007 – you can resize the three main areas (slide, notes, ‘film strip’), as well as zoom the notes area to make text smaller or larger, a great help if you need to stand further away from your main screen. This same layout has been retained for PowerPoint 2010, as seen below.

How do you turn on Presenter View?

First you need to set up your Windows desktop so that you are using both physical screens and showing something different on each (not a duplicate). This might be your laptop and a monitor on your desk, or a projector in a meeting room.

Second, you set up the slide show in PowerPoint to use Presenter View, although if someone has already done this last time and saved the file, it should have the option already ticked.

Prepare your desktop

In Windows Vista and 7 press the Windows key + P, which brings up a set of four options as shown below – you need to choose “extend” so that you now have one super-large desktop which stretches across your main screen and secondary one.

Most laptops have some kind of keyboard shortcut to do something similar, such as Fn + F7, but in general I find that the Windows option tends to give better results, particularly if the two screens have very different sizes or aspect ratios (eg a widescreen laptop capable of 1280 x 800 or higher with a 4:3 projector running at 1024 x 768 or similar). The built-in hardware switch tends to be a bit more “dumb” and may end up squashing one screen or stretching the other, or simply not using the whole of the available area (often limiting your lovely large widescreen display with black bars down either side).

With Windows XP the keyboard option is often the quickest, although some graphics cards had specific tools provided with their drivers to make it easy – simply right click on the desktop and look for choices such as “graphics options” or “display tools”. Failing all of those, choose “Properties” then go to the “settings” tab and set up the displays in there.

Set up your slideshow

In PowerPoint 2002 or 2003, go to the Slide Show menu, choose “Set up show” and look for the option labelled “Show on” you can choose the appropriate screen from there. That simply makes sure the show turns up where it should (usually a projector). You need to also tick the box to “Show Presenter View” if that is what you want.

In 2007 and 2010 simply go to the Slide Show Ribbon and the options are directly shown there (which means it is obvious if someone has already set this correctly).

In all cases, you can’t tick the box for presenter view if you do not already have the system set up to use a second monitor (you will get an error explaining this and a prompt to check you system,  which will take you to the screen resolution dialogue so you can change things there if needed). Once you have ticked the box and save your presentation, it will remember this setting next time you use the same slide show.

Test it before your present

Do make sure you test this out before your audience walk in to be sure the presentation appears on the correct screen. Also take this opportunity to adjust the size of the three areas by dragging their boundaries, and make sure this is suited to where you will actually sit or stand to present from.

Is this really such a secret?

I recently gave a keynote speech about presenting skills (not specifically about PowerPoint, but rather the “soft skills” side of things) to a large audience, many of whom were in middle or senior management positions, and several in sales or marketing roles. Lots of them asked in the break afterwards how I had been able to present for an hour without any reference to notes or cue cards (it was clear I was not reading from the projector screen since there were barely more than 100 words across more than 30 slides in the whole show).

None of them had seen Presenter View before, and once shown how it could be used they could immediately see how it would make their jobs easier and their presentations appear much more professional. Even if you are well prepared and don’t actually need to read from your notes, simply knowing they are there can help calm the nerves of timid presenters.

I also find that because I tend to use visual slides with very large images I can stand well back from the screen and can still see enough to know what is coming up, and this helps segue smoothly from one topic to the next.

(Bonus tip: many people practice every slide again and again, but often forget to practice the bits that join it all together into a single seamless presentation. Practice these joins and Presenter View will help remind you what is coming up so you can present more fluidly, and your audience will follow more easily).

Further reading

If you regularly give presentations, with or without PowerPoint, you may like to take a look at my recommended reading list for people who present, which includes several books on presentation design, some on delivery, and others on improving communication of ideas in general.

There are links to loads of great tutorials and videos about using Office at blogs.office.com. A video tutorial on the Office Casual blog caught my eye today and reminded me that I had been meaning to post about Presenter View for ages. This very informative video from Doug Thomas has several great tips about improving your presentations from industry gurus such as Seth Godin (6 words maximum on a slide), Guy Kawasaki (10-20-30 rule) and Garr Reynolds (using images effectively to tell a story), as well as a show-and-tell section about using Presenter View:

Better PowerPoint Presentations the Office Casual way

What about you?

Do you already use Presenter View? Or have you never heard of it before? Have you tried and struggled with it for some reason? Have you recently started using it and found your presentations and confidence improve because of it? Share your experiences in the comments below…

The minimalist, image-led approach often recommended by followers of Presentation Zen and Beyond Bullet Points (and others) can be very powerful and really help to get your message heard and understood, but people often take it too far and actually delete the title placeholder from their slide, or use the “blank” layout. Even if you don’t want to put words on your slides to show the audience, you should still keep the title, and I’ll explain why and how to achieve this, and discuss a couple of things which might catch you out.

Why put titles on if no-one can see them?

Titles on the slide are not just words on the page, they are also used internally to identify the slides. The titles are used in various places and are really quite an important part of each slide. I’ll cover the most important reasons why I think you should always have a title on every slide and then look at best approaches to do this.

1. It helps you when you are navigating your slideshow during a presentation

From time to time you will need to navigate around in your presentation while presenting it – maybe you are running short of time and need to skip ahead, or a question at the end makes you want to go back and show a particular slide again to explain the answer. Either way, the simplest way to do this if from the right click menu > Go To Slide > then choose where you need to go. Doing this by slide number alone is a nightmare, so make sure all of your slides have titles that make sense to you in this list.

(Aside: if you are using presenter view and only have a handful of slides, then hovering over the slide “filmstrip” at the bottom and using the scroll wheel of your mouse to go left and right is OK, but if you have scores of slides then this gets quite hard work)

2. You can make sense of your slides when creating custom shows

Now, I know not everyone uses the feature to create custom shows, so a quick explanation may be needed. When you present normally, you will see every slide in the presentation (except for hidden ones). You might have to maintain several versions of a presentation – perhaps for occasions where you are given more or less time to cover the subject, so you can’t always get into the depth and detail you want to. Or perhaps you have some general slides about your offering, but then a selection of case studies which you would select from according to your audience so you know you are talking about something interesting to them specifically.

This is what custom shows are for – you can select a subset of your slides, and/or change the order they are shown in, and save that as a ‘version’ of your presentation – within a single PowerPoint file (pptx or ppt – this feature was available in 2003 as well). So you might have a 10 minute version and a full half hour (especially if you are following the Beyond Bullet Points methodology), or one version for investors and one for potential customers, or several for customers in different industries. All in one file. That way, if you update slide 17 with the latest financial results, or alter the picture on slide 23 with a better photograph of your headquarters, you don’t have to go and edit lots of different slide decks, you just edit it once and every one of your custom shows will use the new version (if it is included in that show of course).

So what does this have to do with titles? Well, just like when you are using that right-click to jump to a different part of your presentation, when you are building a new show or editing an existing one you get a list of slides by number, with their titles next to them. Seeing “37. Slide 37” is really not very helpful, and it is even worse with custom shows, because the slide numbers in the show itself are different from in the ‘master’ file – they are in the order they appear in that show. So slide 37 might be slide 15 in one show and slide 18 in another, so now it is even harder to keep track of which one is which unless you have used proper titles on every slide. In the screenshot below you can see that I have chose some of the slides from the left, but in a different order, and it would be quickly confusing as to which slide had what picture on (or whatever content it contains).

3. Title are shown in Outline view

When you use Outline view to help you plan and reorganise your presentation, this shows titles of slides, even if (you guessed it) they are not visible. If you don’t have a title at all and there are no other words on the slide (as in the sort of case we are talking about with large pictures), you see nothing here at all, just a blank line next to the slide number.

4. Titles are used when you publish to another format, particularly to a webpage

If you have a need to publish your presentation out to a web page, the titles of your slides will be used for the outline pane presented to the viewer for navigation, even if they would not be visible on the slides. In the short section of a recent training course presentation I have published and then viewed in Internet Explorer here, you can see the third slide has a title which makes sense for navigation (“Keep things simple”) rather than describing what is on the page (“Albert Einstein” would be a rather odd entry in the menu here). Omitting the title would have left a blank entry, which is not helping the audience at all.

(Aside: for the eagle eyed, you will notice that Protected mode is showing as “Off”, because I saved the webpage locally and the default setting for local and intranet zone is Off for Internet Explorer protected mode on IE8 as shipped with Windows 7)

5. Titles are shown as tooltips in the filmstrip of presenter view

This is a bit more obscure, but I find it useful when presenting lots of slides with images and little text. Imagine you are presenting to an audience, and in the “filmstrip” at the bottom of presenter view you see the next slide coming up and you get a mental block what the main point for that slide is. Total brainfreeze! You know the notes will remind you, but you don’t want to have to wait for the slide to appear then have to read before you can start talking. Also, you might want to segue smoothly from one topic to the next so you need to know where you are headed. The same applies if you are trying to look ahead for a particular point that you can jump to so you can skip a few slides. Right click> go to slide is OK, but even easier is just to hover over the thumbnail view of the slide. The title will popup in a little tooltip and you can be reminded of what your main point was, and the picture that goes with it (whereas the right click has the title only).

How to hide titles so they are not seen by the audience

The simplest way by far is to move the title placeholder so it is not within the area of the slide. In fact, when I design corporate slide templates and themes for clients I always include a layout which has a bare slide (great for pictures) with a title placeholder already just off the top of the slide, called something like “Blank slide with hidden title”.

Alternatively, if you using the layout for “title only” from one of the built-in templates or your own company theme you could add a picture to cover the whole slide which you show while you are talking about that particular topic. This might be a simple photograph of a box shot of your new product, an image of your new widget being used by some hip individuals in a trendy studio apartment (what I call lifestyle’ shots), a screenshot of your software in action, or a portrait of someone or something relevant to the subject, or even something more abstract.

In PowerPoint 2007 if you insert a picture on a blank slide it will fill the whole slide as best it can, and you can adjust the size as discussed in my earlier post and on Jan Shultink’s Slides That Stick blog. By default in 2007 the picture will be in the foreground, with the title hidden behind it, which might be sufficient as long as you are not intending to have the picture appear in some way other than all at once when the slide is shown (so not fading in for example). While it is nice and invisible behind the picture, it is not very helpful when it comes to editing it, so it is probably best to move it anyway.

To get at the title to edit or move it may seem a little tricky but there are various ways to do this, easiest first:

• With the picture selected, hit TAB which will go to the next object on the slide. If you have things in the footer, keep going until it has selected the title placeholder. Grab the bottom edge and drag it until it is just off the slide. Press F2 to edit the text if you need to (if you did not already put text in before the picture), ESC when you’re done (or click elsewhere with the mouse)
• Using the mouse, drag a selection rectangle over the area of the slide where the title is. To make sure you don’t accidentally select and drag the picture, start the rectangle outside the slide itself, in the blank area of screen around it.
• Turn on the selection pane. The button for this is in a couple of places. Home ribbon > Drawing group > Arrange > Selection pane or if you have the picture selected Picture Tools|Format > Arrange group > Selection pane. Every object on the slide will have a little “eye” icon next to it. If you deselect the one next to the picture object, it will become invisible and impossible to select, so now you can get at the title box and edit it. Again, I would still say you are best to move it so you don’t have to do this every time you want to see what it says. Don’t forget to click on the eye to make your picture visible again (more on that later).
• Use Outline view. Here you can directly edit the title, but you can’t move it off the slide so this for me is the least useful method

Things that can catch you out

There are a couple of other things to bear in mind when doing this.

Animation of the title

The slide master you are using may have the title set up so that it builds as part of the slide, for example fading in or having the text appear from one side, then waiting for you to click the mouse before going on to the next item. I’m not going to get into a discussion here as to whether that is a good or bad thing, just to note that if you have a title that is not visible and it is then waiting for you, the audience sees a blank slide until you realise what is going on and catch up with them.

To avoid this, make sure you check the custom animation for the slide and ensure that there is no animation event for the title (in the custom animation pane you will see the effects applied in the slide master slightly greyed out. Right click and “copy effects to slide” then you can remove the ones you don’t need.

All of this is a good reason to have a specific slide master in your template which includes the title off the slide, and has no animation for the title, even if your other slide layouts do.

Alternative method to hide the title, and why not to do this

One of the other methods you will sometimes see people using or proposing to hide their slide titles is to simply hide the title while leaving it in it’s original place. If you look back at the method for getting at a title behind a picture, you will remember the option of using the selection pane to hide an object so that you can see behind it. Well, you could also use that to simply hide something forever -  like a title, say. This would mean it does not show up when you run the show (except in the tooltip if you hover on the thumbnail in presenter view) and you don’t have to worry about animation either. Quick and easy, so why should you not do this?

Firstly, backwards compatibility. If you are sharing the presentation with someone using PowerPoint 2003, they cannot use selection pane to get the title back. They can however see it in outline view, but you might be amazed how many people I do advanced PowerPoint training for who have never used outline to organise and plan their presentation, or do not even know of its existence. These people would not know how to change the title, which may not seem too bad until they duplicate that slide (perhaps to add different captions or some other content) and now they have multiple slides with the same title and can’t edit them.

So the first problem is your colleague may not know how to see it, the second problem is that your customer might, and if you had a slide called “How we get more money out of our customers” then it might not be good to leave that title in. So along comes the document inspector. Using this feature in Office 2007 helps you to identify and clean up this kind of invisible content. Go to Office button > Prepare > Inspect document > pick some options (or all of them for good measure), find ‘dangerous’ stuff and get rid of it. Oops. That title of yours is toast, as it gets classed as “invisible content” and removed (if you tell it to remove the things it finds, obviously you can be a bit more careful and choose not to). So hiding it is OK, but you or someone else could remove it by accident, thinking you are doing something helpful. To avoid this, simply don’t hide the title, move it off the slide as a recommended earlier.

Hang on a minute though, one of the options in the document inspector is to find and remove “off-slide content”. Surely this is no better? Well, even if you choose the option to find (then later remove) off-slide content, the title placeholder is specifically ignored and left alone. The same is not true of any other text box you add, nor the original content placeholders if you moved them off the page. See, I told you titles were special.

Keeping things in proportion

I shudder when I see images that have been pulled and stretched out of proportion, particularly if it is the presenter’s company logo (or worse still that of the audience’s firm, hastily borrowed from their website).
Jan’s tip about dragging by a corner is great for pictures and photos because PowerPoint will assume you want to preserver the aspect ratio, but this is not true for drawings or some vector graphics – a simple hold of the shift key while dragging the corner has the same effect for these files. Note that in both cases, this technique preserves the current aspect ratio, so to get things right in the first place you need to use the reset as pointed out by Jan.

If you are using PowerPoint 2007 or later and you insert a picture from file on a content slide, it will fit it into the content placeholder, so you would then have to expand it up to fit. A quicker way to get it full screen is to make sure to change the slide layout to blank or to title only. Then when you insert the picture it will make it as large as possible while still fitting the whole of the picture on the slide. If your picture is the same orientation (portrait or landscape) and proportion as your slide it will fill it. If it is not then it will still need to be stretched a little to fill the whole slide (this is often the case if you are designing slides for widescreen 16:9 layout and using digital camera pictures which are usually closer to a 4:3 ratio).

Note that in PowerPoint 2003 and earlier, inserting a high resolution picture on a blank slide will usually end up with the image bigger than the slide, as it will be scaled according to how many pixels it has relative to the size of the slide and the output resolution. The best bet is to use a slide layout with a content placeholder for the image, stretch that to the corners of the slide and then insert the picture in that (in many of the built-in templates there are multi-content containers which have an icon in them to go straight to the insert picture dialogue box).

If your image is not the right proportion to fit on your slide and you don’t want to crop it, consider changing the background colour of the slide to black so it at least appears in isolation. Some projectors don’t do black very well and you will get a muddy grey, so experiment with white as an alternative, especially if large parts of the picture have a light colour (typically outdoor shots might have lots of pale sky, for example).

Should you put a caption in front of the picture?

This all depends on the context, in some cases you might put a caption underneath to explain what the picture is, but often this will be unnecessary. “Iwo Jima, February 1945” would be suitable for the picture in Jan’s tutorial if you were talking about the events of the second world war as a matter of history. “Joseph John Rosenthal (1911 – 2006)” might be more appropriate if you actually wanted to talk about the photographer himself or perhaps the role of photo-journalism in modern conflicts. If the picture is just being used as a hook for a more abstract concept such as “success” or “teamwork” then either of these as a caption would be redundant (and a little cheesy).

Should you put a title on the slide?

Absolutely, yes, every single time. You just might not always want to make it visible to the audience. But that topic needs a follow-up post.

Later I may give it a bit more corporate gloss and “pictures of people in smart suits drinking cappuccinos in a meeting, and someone good looking with a headset on smiling at the camera” (to quote a friend who kindly gave me their thoughts on what it was missing).

As regular readers will know, clear presentation of information is a hot topic of mine, particularly when I am delivering software training. As I am a MOS: Master I do a lot of Microsoft Office courses, and try to focus not just on the features of the applications but also advise on good practices. This might include clear layout of a Word document, suitable formatting of an Excel chart, or the whole process of designing a professional presentation to deliver your message clearly and avoid “death by PowerPoint”.

This area of interest means I read a lot of articles about presentation of information in all sorts of media and genres – people like Edward Tufte and Jakob Nielsen being two prime examples, but Hichert and Partner and Presentation Zen bring me back many times to read their latest thoughts. (Incidentally, it is this kind of “extra-curricular” reading that makes me a self-confessed geek. Normal people read Harry Potter, I am told.)

I was pleased, therefore, to stumble across a web design agency that seemed to give some thought to issues of usability, designing a site so people can find it (mainly through SEO) but also to find the right information within it. Not only that, but the Escape design and web agency are happy to publish articles telling how to do some of this stuff for yourself, and have a useful free web page analysis tool.

This produces reports of the header structure of the page, the keywords and their actual frequency in the content, and the words in the content which perhaps ought to be in the keywords. I am sure there are many similar tools out there that do such things, this one just seemed to be trivially easy to use, and gave me some useful information to make my pages better.

Part of the trick of course is not just using this blindly, but getting hard facts to highlight deficiencies. For example, it might make me realise that I had a word in the keywords which was not used on that page. At face value, this might mean I should remove that misleading keyword. On the other hand it could be that I was right when I chose the keywords but now need to edit the body copy to actually include a topic I missed out the first time round.

This is a continual improvement process, and needs revisiting periodically to get the best results. I am happy that despite being a small business, Meteor IT is in the top ten Google hits for several key search phrases, and first result for one in particular that is important to me. I know that metadata keywords do not play such a great part as they used to in search engine results pages (SERPs) as they once did, but they are a useful route to focussing your mind on what you are trying to achieve with a given page.

So, I found a plain speaking site, delivering the information I wanted, in a way I could access and benefit from. Their own website is therefore a pretty good example of the sort of thing I would want an agency to come up with. Unfortunately for them they did not get any business from me this time, but their tool was good enough to prompt me to write this and tell others about it, so it will probably score some success down the line.