Presenting Your Slideshow

F5 starts from the beginning and Shift+F5 starts from the slide you are on. Shift+F5 is the one to learn: restarting from slide one every time you want to check slide 30 wastes most of a rehearsal.

• From Beginning — starts the presentation from the first slide (F5).
• From Current Slide — starts from whichever slide is currently selected (Shift+F5).
• Custom Slide Show — presents a subset of slides in a custom order.

You can also click the Slide Show view button in the lower-right corner of the PowerPoint window to start from the current slide.

During a slide show, you can advance slides using the mouse, arrow keys, spacebar, or Page Down. Go back with the left arrow key or Page Up.

Right-click anywhere during the presentation to access a shortcut menu with navigation options, including Go to Slide, which lets you jump directly to any slide.

Presenter View is a professional presenting mode that shows your slide on the audience's screen while you see a private view with the current slide, upcoming slide, speaker notes, and a timer.

Presenter View needs two displays — your screen and the projector — and PowerPoint decides which is which. If your notes appear on the projector and the slides on your laptop, use Display Settings during the show to swap them. Check this in the actual room before the audience arrives; it is the most common thing that goes wrong in the first thirty seconds.

Speaker notes appear in the Notes pane below each slide and are visible only to you in Presenter View. Use them to store reminders, talking points, or key statistics.

The notes pane is where the sentences you plan to say belong. Moving them off the slide is what lets you cut a slide down to the few words that benefit from being seen — the audience cannot read and listen at once, and given the choice they read.

You can also print speaker notes as handouts using File → Print → Notes Pages.

The laser pointer is useful on a dense chart and unnecessary on a slide with four words. If you are reaching for it constantly, the slide is probably carrying too much.

Hold Ctrl and press the left mouse button to activate the laser pointer. Move the mouse to point to any area on the slide.

PowerPoint's Pen and Highlighter tools let you draw or annotate on slides during a presentation.

Right-click during the slide show, choose Pointer Options, and then select Pen or Highlighter.

At the end of the show, PowerPoint asks if you want to keep your ink annotations. You can keep them on the slides or discard them.

Sometimes you create slides with extra content that you only want to show if an audience member asks. Hidden slides stay in the file but are skipped automatically during the normal slide show.

A hidden slide stays in the file and is skipped during the show, which makes it the right way to hold backup detail for a question you might be asked. Press its number then Enter during the presentation to jump to it, and it appears as if you had planned for the question.

Hidden slides are indicated with a strikethrough number in the slide panel. To jump to a hidden slide during a presentation, type its number and press Enter.

Two more keys are worth knowing. B blanks the screen to black and W to white — press either when discussion starts, so the slide stops competing with the conversation. Typing a slide number then Enter jumps straight there, which is how you answer a question about slide 22 without clicking through fourteen slides while everyone watches.

If you have reached the last slide, a black end screen appears. Press Escape or click the screen to exit.