Don’t fumble your presentation start-ups
I’m sure you have seen presenters between presentations fumbling around in Explorer or within PowerPoint itself to find their presentation after the last speaker. Don’t let it happen to you! Apart from looking unprofessional it adds to the pressure of the moment which, of course, makes it much more likely that you will open the wrong one.
Moreover, have you ever seen the look on the faces of an audience when the presenter opens PowerPoint in slide preview mode to reveal just how many slides they will have to sit through?
The solution
The answer is simply to save your presentation as a slide show (.pps or .ppsx) so that the audience never sees it in any work mode, and to save it to the most obvious place you can, which is probably on your desktop. Of course, you may have to think about whether desktop background (wallpaper) image is appropriate!
It’s a bit extreme, but on occasions I have even gone as far as replacing my desktop background with a screenshot of the title slide of my presentation. If you are not sure how to do that, search the internet for ‘XP [or Vista, etc.] change desktop background’.
I then dragged the presentation file icon to the Quick Launch toolbar and hid all the other icons littering my desktop by right-clicking in the desktop area and selecting ‘ Arrange Icons By’ (XP or ‘View’ in Vista) and unchecking ‘Show Desktop Items’, like this:
(Getting your desktop items back is the reverse of hiding them.)
This produces a desktop that looks like your first slide and, clicking on the shortcut launches your presentation for real. At the end of your presentation, closing it returns you to the desktop. This helps keep your stress level down, is a much better experience for your audience, and might even impress them with your professionalism.
If you are in the position of organizing a conference or seminar, you can adapt this method so that each speaker’s presentation is launched from a desktop with your branding. You can also add a countdown timer presentation to the desktop to run in the break. You will find a selection of those here: Microsoft timer presentations
For conference organisers an alternative to the above strategy is to have a presentation set up with a single slide with text hyperlinks to the speakers’ presentations. The point is to have a way of switching smoothly and easily between them. A more sophisticated approach would be to have thumbnail screenshots of their opening slides with the hyperlinks.
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