re: How to set up "Presenter View" in Powerpoint

John A Thomson — Mon, 04 Jun 2007 20:34:05 GMT

Thanks Steve. Didn't know about Presenter View, which looks to be really useful.

Hopefully Office 2007 SP1 isn't too far away to fix the "issues" in the new office suite, especially Outlook 2007!

re: How to set up "Presenter View" in Powerpoint

Steve Lamb — Tue, 05 Jun 2007 11:54:51 GMT

John> Hopefully you'll find it useful.

What problems are you having with Office/Outlook? Have you reported them anywhere?

re: How to set up "Presenter View" in Powerpoint

AdamV — Thu, 07 Jun 2007 18:33:25 GMT

Presenter view is great, but was not called that back on PowerPoint 2000.

By going to advanced display settings you could extend the desktop to a second monitor in a similar way to how you describe (with Windows 98 or 2000, but not earlier, hence I am fairly sure this feature was not enabled in Office 97). With that done, you simply go to Slide Show > Set up show and there is a box for "show on" and you choose which monitor to show the actual presentation on (the external one, number 2 in most cases presumably).

This is a bit more clunky than later implementations as you are stuck with the old three-pane view with the text-based outline on the left for the presenter (if you go to slide sorter it does not show you which is the current slide). If your slides are very graphical it can be hard to know what is coming up (which is why good slide titles are very important).

A nice thing to remember is that you can also edit the slides as you go along. As soon as you click and edit the presentation (which is running in another window) just halts. Maybe add a blank slide or two for other people's input - especially if discussion is a main theme of the event such as a project meeting where you might make an action list at the end. To carry on you would just Alt-Tab back to the presentation (or F5) and carry on using normal N/P and other buttons to progress. At the end you can just save the whole thing with the extra stuff you added and mail people a copy of the slides including all of this. Presto - a handout of the actual version of the event they attended, not just a generic one.