Preparing a Presentation for Delivery

We want our students to know that the goal in creating a presentation is to be able to effectively deliver it to a specific audience. Besides the creation of slides, the success of a presentation depends on how well you prepare. It's a good idea to rehearse a presentation under actual conditions, if possible, and you should try to anticipate any technical problems that may occur.

Next we will show our students how to prepare a presentation for final delivery.

Adding Slide Timings Manually

We can advance through a slide show in one of two ways:

• Manual advance - Controlled by clicking the mouse button, pressing keys, or clicking commands. This is commonly used when presenting in front of an audience. This method gives the speaker more control over how long he or she wishes to speak, take questions from the audience, or explain the contents of a slide.
• Automatic advance - Moves through the slide show automatically, keeping each slide on the screen for a specified length of time. This method is often used when the presentation is going to be running in the background, at a kiosk, or online.

If we are planning on our slide show automatically advancing, we need to pay attention to the slide timing, or the length of time a slide appears on the screen. We can apply a timing to a single slide, to a group of slides, or to an entire presentation. If we are unsure how much time to allow for the slide timings of a presentation, we can rehearse the slide show while PowerPoint automatically tracks and sets the timings.

First let's set the slide timings manually.

Step 1. To select a slide, in the slide thumbnail list,

Click slide 6

Step 2. To move to the Transitions tab, on the Ribbon,

Click the Transitions tab

Step 3. To begin to set the timing for the selected slide, in the Timing group,

Click the "After" checkbox

The timing is currently set to 00:00.00.

Step 4. To increase the timing to five seconds, in the timing box,

Click five times

The timing now shows 00:05.00. The slide will advance either after five seconds or when we click, whichever comes first.

NOTE: If both of the "Advance slide" settings are checked, the presenter can still manually advance the slides before the timings have elapsed by using the mouse.

Step 5. To view the slide show from the current slide, on the far-right side of the status bar,

Click

Slide 6 appears, and then after five seconds, PowerPoint moves to the next slide.

Step 6. To return to Normal view, press:

Esc key

Now let's see how to rehearse our presentation.

Rehearsing a Presentation

PowerPoint offers a rehearsal feature that uses a timer. We can move through a presentation and practice our speech while PowerPoint records the time we spend on each slide.

Let's rehearse the presentation.

Step 1. To move to the Slide Show tab, on the Ribbon,

Click the Slide Show tab

Step 2. To access the Rehearsal options, in the Set Up group, on the Ribbon,

Click

The slide show begins, and the Rehearsal toolbar appears in the top-left corner of the screen:

The slide show begins with slide 1 in rehearsal mode. The presenter can practice the speech and move through the presentation, animation by animation, and slide by slide. The Rehearsal toolbar includes Repeat, Pause, and Forward buttons, the timing of each slide, and the total time for the entire presentation.

NOTE for MacOS Users: Rehearsal mode looks very different in PowerPoint 2016 for Mac. Use the arrows under the Current Slide to navigate through the presentation.

Step 3. To activate the first animation,

Click

The title appears on slide 1.

NOTE: We can also advance through the slide show by clicking anywhere on the slide.

Step 4. To activate the next animation, on the Rehearsal toolbar,

Click

The subtitle appears on slide 1.

Step 5. To move to the next slide, on the Rehearsal toolbar,

Click

Slide 2 appears.

Each time we move to the next slide, PowerPoint remembers how long the previous slide was displayed.

Step 6. To move through the rest of the presentation, on the Rehearsal toolbar, press:

until you get to the end of the slide show

Slide 9 is the last slide in the presentation. When we click on the Forward button after slide 9 is displayed, a dialog box appears. The window tells us the total time for the show, and asks if we want to keep the new slide timings to use when we view the show. We will record the new timings.

Step 7. To record the new timings, in the dialog box,

Click

To see the timing for each slide, we will need to switch to Slide Sorter view.

Step 8. To switch to Slide Sorter view, on the status bar,

Click

Below each slide, we see a number that indicates that slide's timing. Now the presentation can run automatically using these timings.

While this is a good way to practice a presentation and to see how long the presentation will take, in most cases we will want to use the mouse to advance through our slides, since we may not say exactly the same thing every time.

Let's erase the slide timings and set the slides to advance on mouse click.

Step 9. To switch to the Transitions tab, on the Ribbon,

Click the Transitions tab

Step 10. To deselect the automatic timings, in the Timing group, on the Ribbon,

Click the "After" checkbox

Step 11. To apply this setting to all slides, in the Timing group, on the Ribbon,

Click

The timings are no longer applied to the slides. The timings are still there, just not being used. If we want to use the timings at a later point, we can reapply them. But for now, the presenter will have to move manually from slide to slide during the presentation.

Next we will see how to print handouts based on a presentation.

Creating Speaker Notes and Handouts

We can create, print, and save several views of our presentation. We can print full slides, presenter handouts, and audience handouts. We can also save these as Word documents or PDF files if we would prefer to provide our audience with electronic versions.

NOTE for MacOS Users:  Skip forward to the heading, "Printing Speaker Notes On MacOS".

Printing Speaker Notes On Windows

Speaker Notes, or notes pages, include an image of a slide and the notes associated with that slide. These can be helpful for a speaker who may be more comfortable with paper notes.

Let's see how to print presenter handouts.

Step 1. To move to slide 1,

Click slide 1

The options we need are part of PowerPoint's Backstage area.

Step 2. To view the Backstage area,

Click the File tab

We see the Backstage area and several different options.

Step 3. To access the Print options,

Click Print

The Print options will appear:

From these options, we can choose what to print and how to print it. Let's see how we can print speaker and audience handouts.

Step 4. To explore print options,

Click

The print options appear:

The first section of the drop-down menu provides Print Layout options for slides. You can choose to print Full Page Slides, Notes Pages, or an Outline. The second section provides Print Layout options for handouts. You can print 1 Slide per page, 2 Slides per page, 3 Slides per page, etc.

You can preview any of these print options by clicking on the icon in the drop-down menu and then looking in the pane on the far-right side of your screen.

Let's see what the speaker handouts will look like.

Step 5. To see the speaker handouts, on the drop-down menu,

Click

To the right of the drop-down menu, the preview of our presentation changes. We didn't add speaker notes to all of our slides, so the change may not be obvious unless we are viewing slide 2.

Step 6. To move to slide 2, at the bottom of the print preview area,

Click until slide 2 is visible

We see slide 2 with the speaker notes underneath the image of the slide.

We don't really want to print anything today, so we won't complete the print action.

Note for Windows Users -  Skip forward to the heading, "Saving Audience Handouts as a PDF On Windows".

Printing Speaker Notes On MacOS

Let's see how to print speaker notes when working with PowerPoint 2016 for Mac.

Step 1. To see the print options, on the Menu bar,

Click the File menu, Click Print...

The Print options dialog box opens. However, we may not see all of the options available to us.

Step 2. To see other options, if necessary,

Click

Additional print options are now visible. We want to choose a new layout.

Step 3. To change the Layout option,

Click Notes

To the left of the drop-down menu, the preview of our presentation changes. We didn't add speaker notes to all of our slides, so the change may not be obvious unless we are viewing slide 2.

Step 4. To move to slide 2, at the bottom of the print preview area,

Click

We see slide 2 with the speaker notes underneath the image of the slide.

We don't really want to print anything today, so we won't complete the print action. However, our next task also requires the Print options dialog box, so we will keep it open.

NOTE for MacOS Users:  Skip forward to the heading, "Saving Audience Handouts as a PDF On MacOS".

Saving Audience Handouts as a PDF On Windows

We may want to provide our audience with handouts of our presentation. Audience handouts can include any number of slides per page and space for notetaking.

While we could print these handouts, it is often a better choice to provide our audience with an electronic version. PowerPoint gives us easy ways to save our presentation as either a Word document or PDF document. We will create a PDF today.

The PDF options are part of the Export tools in the Backstage area.

Step 1. Confirm that we are still in the Backstage area.

Step 2. To see the export options,

Click Export

The Export options appear:

NOTE: Depending on the configuration of an individual computer, there may be a "Create Adobe PDF" button.

Many of these options we will explore in a few moments.

While the Create Handouts option seems like a good choice, it will prompt us to save our handouts in Word. That is not what we want to do today. We will create a PDF.

Step 3. To begin creating a PDF, if necessary,

Click

Step 4. To create the PDF,

Click

The Publish as PDF or XPS dialog box opens. This looks similar to a typical Save As dialog box. We will have to make a few changes to publish and save handouts as a PDF.

Step 5. To begin publishing handouts,

Click

The Options dialog box opens:

This dialog box provides us with several choices. We can choose to publish specific slides, create handouts, put frames around slides, and much more.

Step 6. To choose handouts, on the Publish what list,

Click , Click Handouts

We can choose how many slides to put on each page.

Step 7. To select the number of slides per page,

Click , Click 3

The small page preview to the right changes to show us three slides per page. There is also a small notes area next to each slide.

Step 8. To accept these changes,

Click

We are returned to the Publish as PDF or XPX dialog box. Here we could rename our presentation or change the location of the file. Today we will do neither.

We want our PDF to open automatically.

Step 9. To have the PDF open automatically, if necessary,

Click the "Open file after publishing" checkbox

Step 10. To publish the PDF,

Click

The audience handout PDF opens. The file has also been saved.

Step 11. To close the PDF and return to PowerPoint,

Click

We are returned to PowerPoint.

Note for Windows Users -  Skip forward to the module, Delivering the Presentation

Saving Audience Handouts as a PDF On MacOS

The steps for saving audience handouts as a PDF are very different when using PowerPoint 2016 for Mac.

The Print dialog box is still open. To begin saving handouts as a PDF, we will need to change the layout of our document and then save.

Step 1. To change the layout of our print document,

Click ,
Click Handouts (3 slides per page)

A small preview of the page appears to the left.

Now that we have the layout formatted correctly, we are ready to save our document as a PDF. We can also do this from the Print dialog box.

Step 2. To begin saving the handouts as a PDF, in the Print dialog box,

Click , Click Save as PDF...

A new dialog box opens and prompts us to name our PDF file.

Step 3. To name the PDF, in the Save As field, type:

Creating_a_Presentation_Handouts

The Where field should be showing the PPT_Basics folder. If not, it may be necessary to navigate to the correct location.

Step 4. Navigate to the PPT_Basics folder, if necessary.

Step 5. To save the handouts as a PDF,

Click

The PDF does not automatically open when using PowerPoint 2016 for Mac.

Step 6. To view the PDF document, on the desktop,

Double-Click , Double-Click PPT_Basics, Double-Click Creating_a_Presentation_Handouts

The PDF of the handouts opens in the PDF viewer.