Ms Office Tune Up

Good public speakers can tell you that one of the secrets to their success is that they always rehearse a speech, usually several times. This helps them learn their material, discover problem areas (too-long sentences, tongue-tripping phrases, and so on), and internalize the speech to the extent that when they finally get up in front of their audience, their deliv­ery sounds unforced, natural, and conversational.

Good presenters also rehearse their slide shows, and they get the same benefits as their speech-giv­ing colleagues. However, PowerPoint also comes with some technology that gives you even more benefits for rehearsal. This technology is PowerPoint’s Rehearse Timings feature, which enables you to run through your presenta­tion and keep track of how long you spend on each slide and the total presentation time. There are several ways you can take advantage of this information to improve your slide show:

• You can look for slides that take substantially more time than the other slides in your presentation. For example, you might find that most of your slides take 3 or 4 minutes, but you have one slide that takes 10 minutes. That’s almost always an indication that the longer slide contains too much information or is too complex. You should consider dividing the slide into two or three shorter or simpler slides.
• You can look for slides that take substantially less time than the other slides. For exam­ple, you might have several slides that take only 20 or 30 seconds. This indicates either that you’re rushing through your material or, more likely, that those short slides con­tain too little information or are too simple. Consider either expanding the material in those slides or combining some of those slides into a single slide.
• You can ensure that your presentation falls within whatever time constraints you have been given. Most presenters are given a time limit, and professional presenters never wear out their welcome by exceeding that limit. The Rehearse Timings feature also tracks the overall elapsed time on your presentation, so you know whether your deliv­ery goes over your allotted time. If it does, you can cut some material to reduce the delivery time.
• You can ensure that you have enough material to fill your time slot. Few things are as embarrassing as a presentation that falls significantly short of its allotted time. This means that you raced through your material, didn’t explain your slides thoroughly, or that you didn’t have enough material in the first place. With Rehearse Timings, you can identify when a presentation is woefully short and take steps to fix the problem.

Begin by opening your slide show presentation. For accurate timing, use the same com­puter that you’ll use to run the slide show, particularly if you use large graphics or lots of complex transitions since it can take PowerPoint much longer to process these effects on a less powerful computer. Now follow these steps to rehearse the timing for a slide show:

1. Choose Slide Show, Rehearse Timings. PowerPoint launches the slide show and dis­plays the Rehearsal toolbar, as shown in Figure 1. The Slide Time box tells you the amount of time you have spent on the current slide, and then the Presentation Time box tells you the amount of time you spent on the presentation as a whole.


Figure 1 When you choose Rehearse Timings, PowerPoint starts the slide show and displays the Rehearsal toolbar.

2. For each slide, present the material just as you would during an actual presentation. Speak at your normal pace, and be sure to run though all your animations. When it’s time to move to the next slide, you can click the screen as usual, or you can click Next in the Rehearsal toolbar.

TIP

When you present a slide, you might make a mistake that throws off the slide’s timing. In that case, click the Repeat button in the Rehearsal toolbar. PowerPoint subtracts the current slide time from the overall presentation time and resets the Slide Time box to 0:00:00.

NOTE

If the phone rings or you’re otherwise interrupted during the rehearsal, click the Pause button in the Rehearsal toolbar to temporarily suspend the timers.

3. When you’re done, PowerPoint displays a dialog box that shows you the total presen­tation time and asks if you want to keep the slide timings. Click Yes.

When you present a slide, you might make a mistake that throws off the slide’s timing. In that case,
With the rehearsal complete, PowerPoint drops you off in the Slide Sorter view and dis­plays the slide times under each slide, as shown in Figure 2.

Figure 2 After you complete the rehearsal, PowerPoint displays the Slide Sorter view, which shows the time beneath each slide.

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