Ms Office Tune Up

When you run a slide show, the operative phrase is “What You See Is What They Get.” In other words, what you see on your monitor is what your audience sees on the projection screen. That’s not a problem if the slide show goes smoothly, but if you have to access the slide show menu during the presentation (for example, to select a different pointer or to navigate to another slide), the appearance of the menu not only distracts your audience, but it also looks unprofessional. This is doubly true if you need to access something in another Windows program (by pressing Ctrl+T during the slide show), resulting in the sudden intrusion of the Windows taskbar and Start menu into the proceedings.

You can work around this problem by using PowerPoint’s Presenter view on a system that has two monitors attached. Presenter view displays the full-screen slide show on one moni­tor, and on the other its displays a special Speaker view, which divides the screen into three sections: the current slide, the current slide’s Notes page, and a strip containing thumbnail images of the presentation’s slides. You can use the Speaker view to navigate the slide show and change options, and the audience members are none the wiser because they just see the current slide.

To use Presenter view, first attach a second monitor to your computer and then configure that monitor in Windows, as described in the following steps:

1. In Windows Vista, choose Start, Control Panel and then under Appearance and Personalization, click Adjust Screen Resolution. (In Windows XP, choose Start, Control Panel, Display.)
2. Click the 2 icon.
3. Click Extend the desktop onto this monitor, as shown in Figure 1.
4. Adjust the resolution and colors for the second monitor as needed.
5. Click OK.
6. If Windows asks if you want to keep the new settings, click Yes.

Now that Windows knows about your second monitor, the next step is to tell PowerPoint that you want to use another monitor during your presentation. Here are the steps to follow:

1. Choose the Slide Show tab.
2. In the Monitors group, use the Show Presentation On list to click the monitor that you want to use to display the slides to the audience (see Figure 2).
3. If the presentation monitor requires a special resolution, use the Resolution list to click the setting you want to use.
4. Click to activate the Use Presenter View check box.

Figure 1 First you need to tell Windows that a second monitor is attached to your computer.

Figure 2 Use the Slide Show tab’s Monitors group to set up your presentation to run on two monitors.

The next time you start the slide show, PowerPoint uses the Presenter view: The monitor you selected in Step 2 displays the current slide in full-screen mode, whereas the other monitor gives you the Speaker view, which is shown in Figure 3.

Most of today’s video adapters come with a graphics coprocessor, a microprocessor that per­forms graphics chores such as 2D and 3D rendering which would otherwise be handled by the computer’s CPU. This can help speed up the display on your monitor. If you have this type of hardware in your computer, click the Slide Show tab and then click Set Up Slide Show to display the Set Up Show dialog box. Click the Use Hardware Graphics Acceleration check box and then click OK.

Figure 3 In the Presenter view, you see the Speaker view, which includes the current slide, its notes, and slide thumbnails.

Technorati Tags: slide show using two monitors, powerpoint 2007

Popularity: 3% [?]