I’ve now written two posts about how to avoid embarrassing yourself when you’re presenting at a conference or job talk (or lecture, or any other presentation where you have notes in PowerPoint). That is, preparing your slides in a way so that when they are pulled up, the audience doesn’t see your speaker notes.
 
The embarrassing moment can be avoided altogether, though, on the presentation end. It is particularly important to keep this issue in mind when you are either a conference organizer/chair, or someone who invited a speaker/job candidate and is helping the speaker set up. It is relatively easy “at the podium” to avoid the embarrassing moment by thinking about how you pull up the slides.
 
So, lots of different ways to do so smoothly, depending on the context and the equipment, such as:

• The simplest way: Don’t connect the projector until you have sorted everything out (copied slides, opened file) and started the slide show.
  
• As soon as you open PowerPoint (preferably before projecting the images), close the speaker notes. That way, even if you end up leaving presentation mode at some point, the speaker notes still won’t show.
• On my laptop, I can choose Windows-P and then choose “computer only” so that until I am ready, the screen won’t show my laptop screen. This option works well if you have to have the connection up the whole time. Just remember to undo it before your presentation begins.

 
At a conference a couple of years ago, my symposium chair was paging through all of my slides to make sure they were working, but was doing so as they were projected on the large screen. As the organizer, do think about the speakers and whether they would want everyone to see all of their slides/graphs/data before they even begin presenting (general answer = no).
 
I use a similar technique when lecturing. This past Spring I had a 290 student class, with 2 very large screens. When I arrived the screens were already connected to the built in computer, and I still had to log onto the campus system, find my slides, download them, and pull them up. I’m not a morning person, so I don’t want to risk logging in live, on screen (I did occasionally enter my password in the wrong box and it did appear on my monitor, but fortunately, not the big screen).  Luckily, on the podium there was an option to black out the screens. So I would keep screens blank until I logged in and pulled up my slides just the way I wanted them, and then could project my first slide. Much better than logging in with an audience, or showing the class all of my slides at once (of course, just in case, I also didn’t have any notes on slide 1).
 
In short, don’t just protect yourself from the embarrassing moment – protect your colleagues as well.
 
“Avoid Showing Others’ Speaker Notes first appeared on Eva Lefkowitz’s blog on July 12, 2018.”

Many academics have switched from having printed notes we used during presentations to instead using the notes feature embedded in PowerPoint. Doing so decreases the fumbling through pages in our hands and can move our gaze from down to forward (though does chain us to the podium area more).
 
But, we’ve all been to the job talk where, as someone’s laptop is first connected to the projector, or their file is first opened, we can see the notes on their first slide that may something like, “I enjoyed meeting many of you during my visit so far.” Don’t be that person.
 
Previously I discussed one way to avoid this problem – saving your slides as a show. In general, I recommend that you use the save-as-show technique, particularly if you are giving a job talk or another high stakes presentation. However, I confess that I rarely take the time to use this technique anymore. And, there is a situation where this technique is not very useful – when you are presenting on a panel and the organizer wants to pull up everyone’s slides and paste them all into one shared document.
 
An alternative technique is to save a duplicate copy of your title slide, but delete the presentation notes from the first version of it. Then, when someone pulls up your slides, it will look like this, with a blank notes page:

But when you go up to present, you can seamlessly advance to your second copy of your title slide, which has your notes on it. 
 
Very simple, but can save you potential embarrassment.
 
“PowerPoint Trick: Duplicate Your Title Slide first appeared on Eva Lefkowitz’s blog on June 21, 2018.”

La de da. Let's pretend it hasn't been an almost one year absence. And also, that I've come back to just share one small tip. That you may know already.

When I was in grad school, one of my advisors, Terry Au, drilled into us that we needed big font sizes in PowerPoint presentations and posters. I didn't fully appreciate it at the time, but I trusted her (look, she's a vice president at a major university now). Now, with my way over-40 eyes (and not quite yet over anything else), I get it.

Whoever designs PowerPoint templates didn't have Terry as an advisor because the font size defaults are really small. I have, many times, gone back through and changed the font size of each and every slide, one by one. This falls into the category of Inefficient, but too lazy to figure out the alternative.

Well, today I figured it out, and I'm sharing it here in case you ever fall into inefficient and too lazy to figure out moments. Here goes:

1. Go to VIEW at top menu
2. Choose "slide master"
3. Select the level of text you want.
4. Choose "home" from the top menu
5. Change the font size.

Magic. You can even change the font type, if you so choose. And, I'm noticing as I type, you can change the footer too - so you can have, for instance, the same footer on every slide. My mind is blown.

If you are a more visual person, you can get it directly from MS Office support, with pictures. But no annoying commentary.

“The post Change font size on all slides in PowerPoint  first appeared on Eva Lefkowitz’s blog on October 23, 2017”

I was recently out with some friends having drinks, and we started talking about PowerPoint slides (yes, we really are that nerdy). My friend told me about her colleague, Michael Alley, who argues that most of us are using PowerPoint incorrectly. His argument is that the Title/bullet point format that most of us use is mostly designed to help the speaker remember what to say, rather than to help the audience remember what was said. He proposes, instead, to use a technique he calls Assertion Evidence.

I’m in social science, and this technique was designed for physical science and engineering. I’ve spent some time poking around the website, and I definitely see the value in such a talk for science and engineering. I haven’t decided yet, though, how well it would translate to social science, or more specifically, the kind of social science I do. Much of the background I would present in a talk would be hard to present visually. The results could be visual, though more likely graphs than images. But at a general level, I like the perspective that we are all presenting with very similar techniques, and that we should consider whether our techniques are the best way to present.

We recently had a job candidate (and soon to be new colleague, Tim Brick) visit who presented using a different program (possibly Keynote? Unfortunately I’m not sure). It was refreshing to see something that was slightly different from exactly what we are used to seeing. One thing I really liked is that at the top of the presentation, he had a few simple words that outlined what he would be presenting. Honestly, I forgot the exact words, but if it was a talk I was giving, it might have broken down like this:

Overview            Theory                  Prevalence                         Predictors                           Outcomes           Done!

As he spoke, one of the words on top would be slightly brighter so as an audience member I had a sense of where he was in the talk. I liked it.

Then there are of course flashy ways to present, like Prezi. I made a Prezi once – it was a simple one, but it felt like it took me a lot more time than PowerPoint does. Perhaps that is only because I wasn’t used to it yet, though. There are lots of others; and lots of articles suggesting specific programs/websites.

What do you think of assertion evidence? How do you give presentations – standard in PowerPoint, or something different? Share your thoughts.                               

“The post Alternatives to standard PowerPoint presentations first appeared on Eva Lefkowitz’s blog on June 23, 2014.”

You know when a speaker first opens up his PowerPoint slides, and he hasn't started the presentation yet so it's open in edit mode, and it may say something in the notes section like, "Good afternoon, thank you so much for inviting me here" or something else that he probably didn't want you to know that he wrote out?  Or it shows the first 6 slides, so you see the big punchline coming up? There's a solution for that.

You can save your slides as a Show, rather than as a Presentation. It's a simple option in "save as" under "save as type," just as if you wanted to save it as a PDF instead. If you save something as a Show, then as soon as you click on the file, it will open up your first slide in full screen all ready to start presenting, rather than opening it in edit mode.

A couple of caveats.

1. If you think you might go back to edit it again, make sure you SAVE CHANGES in the Presentation version before you save as a Show. You actually CAN edit a Show version, but it's harder to get it to open in edit mode (you have to do it within PowerPoint, rather than in Explorer or directly from a desktop/file folder). So I find it easier to work with the Presentation version, but save the Show version for the actual presentation.

2. If it's something where I'm going right into the material without a title (like my presentation tonight for HDFS Follies), then I like to have a blank slide at the beginning, so that I can open it up as early as I want but don't have to show my first slide until I'm ready.

“The post PowerPoint trick #2:  Save as a show first appeared on Eva Lefkowitz’s blog on May 2, 2014.”

Sometimes I really, really, heart google.

I am prepping my notes for tomorrow's class. It is late. When I post a version for the students, I like to remove all of my own notes in the notes section. In the past I have gone through this process slide by slide. But tonight I wondered if PP could do it all at once. And google found this information for me (apologies - there is a very loud embedded video).

Essentially, it's a feature in "inspect document" where you can choose to have it check "presentation notes." Then when it comes up as identifying information, you can ask it to delete all of it.

That saved about 10 minutes of my life. Which I have filled with this post. So you should thank google, too.

“The post Powerpoint trick #1: Remove all notes at once first appeared on Eva Lefkowitz’s blog on January 12, 2014.”