How to Use Timed Slides for Your PowerPoint 2013 Presentation

There are many things to think of when presenting for an audience. You often need to be so aware of your diction and content that you forget useful things like timing. When using Microsoft PowerPoint 2013 you can make things easier on yourself when you present by using times slides.

Timed slides are most effective for speakers on a strict schedule. If you absolutely cannot afford to go over time then you must use timed slides. They can serve as a reminder that you need to wind up your speech, they keep you from rambling and most importantly let you know how much time has passed without glancing at your watch.

Watch the free video here, transcripts for the entire video follow:

Video transcripts:

Hello again and welcome back to our course on PowerPoint 2013. In this section, we’re going to actually look at a slide show. Now I’m going to do the most basic version of this really. I’m going to use the same Parliament presentation that we’ve been working on, this is example-14 from the supplied files.

The first thing we’re going to do is to set the slide show up. Of course, all of the preparation has been done but when you come to actually show the slide show you still have to decide on the day what you’re going to show. I’m going to show the full presentation, not the school one. And if you look at the Setup Group here on the Slide Show tab on the Ribbon, you can see some of the options that are immediately visible. For instance, if I don’t want to use automated timings and I don’t want to playback a narration, I can uncheck those. Media controls relate to using and playing audio and video clips. I don’t need those at the moment. They aren’t there anyway, but I might as well switch them off. So straightaway I know this is going to be a manual presentation and I’m going to be working through it manually, which is exactly the way I want to do it.

So let’s now setup the slide show. Check the settings, presented by a speaker full screen. Yes. I don’t want to loop continuously. I do want to show it without narration because I’m going to control this myself. And I don’t want to show it without animation. The pen color is currently red; I’m going to keep it at red. And the laser pointer color is also red. I’m going to keep that at red. All slides. I’m going to operate this one manually. And don’t worry about Presenter View and Slide Show Monitor automatic at the moment. I’ll come back to those later. So the settings are ready and all I need to do now is to start the slide show.

With starting the slide show, I’m going into Slide Show View which is the only view we haven’t looked at so far in any detail. Slide Show View occupies the whole screen basically. So there are limited amount of controls visible, although there are some. And the main choice you have when you go into starting a slide show is on the left of the Ribbon here. Do you want to start from the beginning or do you want to start from the currently selected slide? Let’s start from the beginning.

Now as the slide show starts I get my first transition. Now to click through, there are a number of ways of doing this. The simplest way is just to click with the mouse. And as you click through, you get the transitions. I’ve basically got these wiping up. And let’s look at some of the other things we can do while the slide show is in progress.

Now there are a whole range of keyboard shortcuts that you can use. You can use the arrow keys to go backwards and forwards; so left arrow generally takes you back through the presentation, right arrow generally takes you forward through the presentation. And you can also use certain keyboard shortcuts such as N for the next slide, P for the previous. Don’t forget when you’re talking about next and previous, in the case of animations it will be the next animation. Now if you’re dealing with an automatic presentation, you would stop or restart it using the S key. And you can display a shortcut menu. Keyboard shortcut for that is Shift and F10. Now that gives you a short menu at the top where you can end the show, you can get help, you can reset pointer options, and so on. So having that menu can be pretty useful when you’re partway through a presentation. Another way of stepping through the slides is to press Enter for next and to press Backspace for previous. If you want to go to a particular slide, you can literally type the number. Say, I wanted to go to Slide 6, I could type six, press Enter, and it would take me Slide 6.

Now let’s look at how to use the laser pointer. Now to use the laser pointer, you hold the Control key down and use the left mouse button and with that you can point at any point on the presentation. So for instance, if I click from here into the pie chart, hold the Control key down, left mouse key, and I can point at one of the slices in the pie. Now the other way of bringing that menu up is to right click somewhere on the slide. From there you can choose from pointer options. Laser pointer we’ve already seen, but you could also select pen and then with the left mouse key held down you can actually write on a slide. It takes a little bit of practice, but again that can be very affective in a presentation. Included with that we have an option for an eraser; so if I want to rub out what I’ve written that’s pretty straightforward as well.

If you make ink annotations during a presentation when you close down the presentation, you’re given the option of keeping them and they actually become part of your presentation.

So I think we’ve covered the main points there. When you finish with the presentation usually the way that people end it is to press the Escape key and that brings you back into Normal View in PowerPoint 2013.

Now a couple of sections ago when we started looking at preparation, I talked about the way that people present PowerPoint presentations; we talked about the paper only version, but we’ve just looked at what I suppose you might think of as the traditional computer based version where basically maybe a very small group of people would gather around a computer screen or a laptop screen and watch somebody going through a PowerPoint presentation in much the way we just have; maybe using right and left arrow keys to go through it, maybe able to highlight certain things, bring up a menu, skip a slide or two, and so on. And even when people started plugging monitors into PCs and letting the audience look at the monitor while the person driving the presentation sat at the PC, it was very often the case that the person doing the presentation was looking at exactly the same thing as the audience. But now we have something called Presenter View and in Presenter View, the person doing the presentation can see a lot more and a lot more useful information than the audience can. So what I want to do now is to show you Presenter View in action.

Now, of course, I can’t truly show you the full story because I can’t show you two monitors at once, but the setup that I’ve got now is basically that I have a PC where I’m running Presenter View or I will be in a moment anyway, and I have an external monitor, think of it as a very big projection screen, and on that I am basically going to have Slide Show View. Normally, I go on to the Slide Show tab now to start this presentation. Let’s go back to Slide 1. You can always go into Slide Show View in the same way that you go into the other views using one of the buttons at the right hand end of the status bar. So let’s just go down there. There’s a button there, click on that, Slide Show button, the one that looks a bit like a projector standing on a little stand, and let’s go into Slide Show View.

Now I’m back into Slide Show View now and I did mention earlier on that there are actually some little controls in Slide Show View and you need to look down here towards the bottom left and you’ll see a little row of buttons. They’re fairly gray, quite difficult to see. But you’ve got a left button and a right button. There’s another one which will bring up laser pointer pen and highlighter settings. There’s another one here which will show you all of the slides. There’s another one that zooms in. I’ll talk about that in a moment. But the one of the right with the three dots can take you into Presenter View. So if I say Show Presenter View, I will see Presenter View on the screen.

Now you’ll have to believe me about this but while Presenter View is on the screen, the slide show itself is on the monitor, the one that the audience can see. Now in Presenter View, I have many useful options available to me. Let’s start on the right. I have my notes over here. So I can actually read my notes while I’m sitting there stepping my way through the presentation, I can be reading my notes. I also have the pens. I pointed out the pen and laser pointer tools options just now. If I click on that, I can for instance say well I want the highlighter and then I could maybe highlight something on a slide. Now I also have a zoom into slide option here which gives me a little sort of rectangle that I can zoom in somewhere on the slide, choose the part I want to focus on, click, that’s zoomed in, and then click again on the magnifier to click out again. Now the three dots here let’s me hide Presenter View in which case I would go back to Slide Show View. And I also have options here like Help and end show. If I want to put a black screen on the monitor that the audience can see, click on black screen there to do that, but I can still read my notes and I can still work out what I want to do next. And that could possibly include going to one of the other slides.

Now there are a couple of other very useful things that I have in Presenter View. The top left I have a Show Taskbar option which will let me see my Windows taskbar at the bottom in case I need to do anything particular like run another program to check something. I also have a Display Settings button and amongst the options there is swap Presenter View and Slide Show. So if in fact, when I start this all up I find that they’re the wrong way around so that I can see the slide show and the audience can see Presenter View, then I can figure my way around switching those back again. I can also set this particular display to just duplicate the slide show, and then the ever important end slide show at the top here as well. And finally down at the bottom here I’ve got some little buttons I can use to make the text of my notes larger or smaller to make them easier to read if necessary, particularly if I’m say in a room with bad light.

So that’s Presenter View. It’s a great way when you’re in a crowded room, big presentation, big monitor display with the audience watching it. You can see a lot more of what’s going on and control what’s going on and the audience will only ever see what’s in Slide Show View.

So you should be in a position now to give your presentation. You need to make sure that everything’s ready; that it’s all spell checked, grammar checked, you’ve got your transitions in place, etc. If you’re just running through it on paper make sure that the handouts are all prepared. If you’re presenting it electronically, then make sure that you know how to use Presenter View if you have two alternative devices, one to run it from and one to display it on. And, of course, if at any stage you are parting company with a copy of your PowerPoint presentation, don’t forget to make sure that it’s as secure as you need it to be, for example, as we’ve seen make sure that you’ve removed any personal information that you don’t want in it and make sure that you’ve removed your presenter notes if that’s what you intend to do. In terms of actually giving the presentation, if you’re giving it manually, as I said Presenter View is great. But you may have decided to record it, including recording a narration. If that’s the case, then when you play the slide show make sure that you’ve got options like play narrations here set and you’ll sit back and enjoy other people watching your slide show either with you there or without you not there.

So that’s it on giving a presentation. I’ll see you in the next section.

Simon Calder

Chris “Simon” Calder was working as a Project Manager in IT for one of Los Angeles’ most prestigious cultural institutions, LACMA.He taught himself to use Microsoft Project from a giant textbook and hated every moment of it. Online learning was in its infancy then, but he spotted an opportunity and made an online MS Project course - the rest, as they say, is history!