While there are countless tips and tricks out there, these three are perhaps the most widely used based on my experience so far.
1. Display the current slide in slide show
Most of us (if not all) know that pressing the F5 button will immediately turn your presentation into a slide show…right from the first slide. Now picture this. You are working on a presentation which consists of 35 slides, and you are editing slide number 26. If you hit the F5 button, the slide show will begin from the first slide, but you want it to start from slide number 26. To achieve this, all you need to do is to press both the Shift and F5 buttons together at the same time. This is particularly useful when you have a lot of animations in a slide and want to repeatedly test it to make sure it works as intended when running in slide show mode.
2. Jump to a particular slide number in an instant
There are occasions where a set of printed slides are given to each of the attendee in the meeting. When conducting the presentation, an attendee may flip through the printed copy and ask you a question, say, in slide number 5 when you are already presenting at slide number 12. You can quickly jump to slide number 5 by first pressing the 5 button and immediately hit the Enter button while you are still running in slide show mode. You don’t have to exit the show and go into edit mode to scroll up to that slide.
3. Pause the presentation with a black or white screen
Here’s another scenario. One of the agendas in your presentation is to conduct a live demo of how to use a product. You want the audience to pay full attention on your demonstration, not on the slide show. This is easy. Just press the B button once (while the presentation is still in slide show mode) to black out the entire presentation. When you’re ready to return to your presentation, press the B button again. If you don’t like the black screen, well, you can press the W button to get the white one.
I hope you find the above tips useful in your next presentation, as it did for me. :)
