Name: PowerPoint Tutorial - Tools for better presentations
Uploaded: 2025-08-02T18:41:00.000Z
Duration: 9 min 46 s
Description: Thousands of YouTube videos with English-Chinese subtitles! Now you can learn to understand native speakers, expand your vocabulary, and improve your pronunciation...

Modal verbs - A2

One of the cardinal rules of presentations is that you shouldn't fill your slides with text.

Gerund

Don't force your audience to read along with you by putting complete sentences or paragraphs on your slides.

Ideally, you should present key bullet points and expand on them verbally during your presentation.

Now, this causes some people to worry about having to remember all the points or information they want to get across, but that's what the speaker notes section in PowerPoint is for.

Speaker notes are notes that you'll only see on your own computer while presenting, as long as you're connected to a projector or a second monitor.

Each individual slide has its own notes section, so you can always see your notes for a particular slide when that one comes up in the presentation.

Now, if you don't see this area that says click to add notes at the bottom of the window, you can click the notes button here to toggle that open.

You can also expand this pane to get more room to write and review your notes.

And then just type in whatever you need to remember for this particular slide.

Now, if I go into slideshow mode, because I'm only using a single monitor right now, those notes don't show up.

A little later in this chapter, I'll show you what it looks like when you're connected to two monitors.

Now, if you have a lot of notes to write or keep track of, you can go to the view tab and here select notes pages.

This allows you to see more of your notes at once, and you can also select and format text here just by highlighting it.

And then I can come up to the home tab, for example, and make that bold.

You can also switch back to normal mode here directly from the notes page view.

Now, you also don't have to think of notes as just for your own use exclusively.

If you plan on giving your audience a copy of your presentation as a handout, you can include notes in the handout so they'll be able to better remember what you talked about on each slide.

When you go to file and print, one of the options under the second menu here is notes pages.

So in this preview of what the page will look like, you can see my notes on the page.

So notes can either be for your own use, or they can be forward facing and add value to your slides if you distribute them as a handout after your presentation.

Okay, let's say your presentation is done and you're ready to present it in front of a live audience.

Now in reality, presenting doesn't only involve creating a slideshow and then getting up and presenting it.

You'll need to rehearse your presentation.

You may need to continue to edit it for time constraints or to make sure it flows properly.

I'm not going to be getting into tips for presenting here, but I strongly suggest you check out the course called Creating and Giving Business Presentations if you want to hone your presentation skills.

I'll also be recommending some other titles at the end of this course.

But in this video, I want to go over the most important tools and controls you'll need to know in order to use PowerPoint smoothly while presenting.

Now we've already seen this several slideshow mode, we can click the slideshow button.

And we know that pressing escape leaves that mode.

You can also press shift F5 to go into slideshow mode.

So both the button here at the bottom of the screen and shift F5 start the slideshow on the current slide.

You can see each time I started here on slide two.

You can also go to the slideshow tab and click from beginning, which starts your presentation from the beginning no matter which slide you're on.

That can save you a few clicks if you're on some random slide out of dozens and don't want to navigate back to the beginning first.

Alternately, the keyboard shortcut of F5 will also start you from the very first slide.

Once you're in your presentation, you can advance from slide to slide either by clicking your mouse or by using the down or right arrows on your keyboard.

You can go back to the previous slide by using the left or up arrows.

The spacebar can also be used to advance through the presentation.

And that can be an easier button to press if you're the type of speaker who walks around a lot and you need to reach over to your computer to advance to the next slide.

Once you reach the final slide, you'll see this black screen saying that it's the end of the show and click to exit.

I really like this screen because it prevents you from just dumping your audience back into the normal view of the slides, which you might not want them to see.

So I'll click to exit and let me show you a couple more things.

I'll press F5 to go back into the slideshow.

One thing about screens is that our eyes are always drawn to them.

During your presentation, you might have to talk at length on a particular point or topic, but your audience is naturally going to keep staring at the screen most of the time.

To get their attention off the screen and onto you, press B as in black and that turns your screen black so there's nothing to look at.

And when you're done making your point and are ready to move to the next slide, you can press B again or just click your mouse or hit the space bar or press the down arrow.

Alternately, you can also press W to go to a white screen if you prefer.

And lastly, it's a little bit hard to see against this background, but if I move my mouse on the screen, if you look in the lower left-hand corner, you'll see these buttons that appear down here.

So these buttons do a couple of different things.

The arrows let you move forward and backwards in your presentation.

The pen tool here comes in handy when you need to point at something on your slide.

For example, you can select laser pointer and that puts a red dot on your screen so you can point that at things on the slide.

There's also a pen option here for when you want to draw on your slide or to circle something or highlight or otherwise draw attention to something on the slide.

You can even choose from different pen colors here as well.

There's also an eraser tool used to remove individual drawings or you can erase all of your drawings from this menu by choosing erase all ink on slide.

And we also have a highlighter tool here as well.

Next to the pen tool is a button to bring up all the slide thumbnails so you can quickly jump to specific slides.

This can be particularly useful if you have a lot of slides and need to move ahead very quickly.

There's also a magnifier for when you need to zoom in on your slides and to show detail.

Now a feature that's exclusive to the Microsoft 365 version of PowerPoint is the ability to display live subtitles or captions.

This can be especially useful for people who may have difficulty hearing you while you're presenting.

So once you click the button you'll be able to speak normally and PowerPoint will display what you're saying as text.

Be aware that these property expansions are alternative and subject to change.

And you can see it's putting the text of what I'm saying down here at the bottom of the screen.

Now be aware that as of this recording PowerPoint fully supports live captions and subtitles for languages like English, Chinese, French, German, Italian and Spanish while other languages have partial support like Arabic, Japanese, Swedish and several others.

But Microsoft says recognition of more languages will improve over time.

Now this last button here is a menu containing other useful options like last viewed to jump to the last viewed slide and presenter mode which we'll talk about next.

But for now those are some of the basic controls you should be familiar with when it comes time to present your slideshow.

I've previously mentioned that when you're in a presenting situation where you've got your computer hooked up to a projector or a second monitor, PowerPoint gives you a set of presenter tools so you can keep track of things like your slide notes, the current time, the upcoming slides and so on.

These tools show up by default whenever you have a second display but be sure to go to the slideshow tab and make sure use presenter view is checked.

You can also enter presenter view without connecting to a second display which you might want to do to set the view up the way you like before you're in front of a live audience.

Let's go into slideshow view and I'll move my cursor down here to the lower left and I'll click this menu button and choose show presenter view.

Okay so this is what you see on your computer when you're connected to a projector.

The large slide here is the slide your audience is currently seeing.

To the right you can see the upcoming slide so you won't be surprised if you forget the order of your presentation.

If you have a slide that has notes on it, I'll advance to the next slide here, you'll see them appear over here to the right.

We can even use these size buttons here if you're having trouble reading them at their current size.

Above the main slide you have a timer so you can keep track of how long you've been presenting.

If you find this distracting you can just pause it and there's also a button here to reset the timer.

Personally I'm always fine with just being able to see the clock over here in the upper right.

I usually know what time I'm supposed to wrap my presentations up so I can just keep an eye on the clock.

At the bottom of the screen you can use the arrow buttons to advance forward or backwards in your presentation.

This bar you see here is a progress bar that indicates how far you've progressed through the presentation.

Basically you can control your entire presentation with the tools found here.

You can also click end slideshow here at the top to end the slideshow.

Now sometimes when you connect your computer to a projector the presenter view ends up being what the audience is seeing.

You can click display settings here to swap the displays to get the presenter view back on your computer screen.

Alright so I'll use the menu here to switch out of presenter view by choosing hide presenter view and back to the single slide view that the audience sees.

Now if you happen to click that by accident you can always come back down to the menu here and select show presenter view to go back.

Okay so that's the presenter view in PowerPoint which will show up anytime you connect to a second monitor or a projector.