Giving a bad PowerPoint presentation is one thing. There are a thousand things that can result in what has become known as death by PowerPoint. At the other end of the spectrum is what I call suicide by PowerPoint.
Suicide is creating a PowerPoint and then not knowing how to control the presentation. Getting started is easy. You can click the slide show icon in the corner, select the slide show menu or press F5. Any of these will get you started. I have seen people that couldn’t get the PowerPoint started. It left me wondering exactly how many times they had rehearsed.
Once you get going, there are so many ways to go to the next slide, you probably won’t have trouble unless you skip a slide and need to go back one. This is where a lack of preparation will kill you (and your presentation).
Here is everything you need to know to control your presentation like a seasoned veteran.
| Start Show | F5 |
| Start Show at current slide | Shift-F5 |
| Next Slide | Enter, Right Arrow, Down Arrow, Page Down, Space Bar, N |
| Previous Slide | Backspace, Left Arrow, Up Arrow, Page Up, P |
| Go to First Slide | Home |
| Go to Last Slide | End |
| Make the screen Black | B or Period |
| Make the screen White | W or Comma |
| Hide the cursor | A or = |
| End the presentation | ESC or - |
Microsoft has a comprehensive list. I have listed all the ones I have used.
If you give frequent presentations, I recommend a wireless controller. It will let you move away from the keyboard and give you single click Forward and Backward control. You can pick one up for as little as $25.
TSPY=Could Save Your Life… or at least a lot of personal embarrassment.
![Dum Dum Dum Dum Da Dum Dum Da Dum [406/1000]](http://farm8.staticflickr.com/7197/6854417645_0612db02f1_t.jpg "Dum Dum Dum Dum Da Dum Dum Da Dum [406/1000]")
![Manual Aperture [405/1000]](http://farm8.staticflickr.com/7055/6849853919_313cb31dae_t.jpg "Manual Aperture [405/1000]")
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Several weeks ago, we had a vendor come in to do a presentation about a software product she was trying to sell us. She was late, walked into a room full of administrators (including the superintendent, assistant superintendent, and curriculum director), and pulled out a flash drive. She hadn’t pre-arranged for a computer to be available, but a laptop was still set up from an earlier meeting. After the painful process of figuring out where to plug the thing in and how to open the file, she finally got to the title slide of her presentation. Since there was no mouse connected to the laptop, she was lost. Someone finally told her to use the spacebar to go to the next slide, but when she inadvertently pressed it twice, she had to start the presentation over again.
Needless to say, we didn’t buy the software.
Hint: start the presentation then press F1 for a list of all the shortcut keys you can use while giving the presentations. If you can’t work out how to start the presentation in the first place … well. Perhaps it’d be better if you just talked and waved your arms around a bit.
Does anyone advocate using the slide show viewer that comes bundled with PP for presentations? I never taught people to do a slide show from within PP, because then your audience sees the “guts” of the program when it’s over. I always trained them to use the viewer program.