One of the most difficult and intangible qualities of any outstanding presentation is “Flow.” Presentations with “flow” seem organized, logical and easy to follow. Without this attribute, the students/audience may feel the presentation is disjointed. Worse yet, if your presentation is lacking “flow”–the audience may entirely stop paying attention.
In PowerPoint presentations, you can lose your audience rather quickly, simply by switching from PowerPoint to an external program such as a Web brower. I can’t tell you the number of times that I have seen a presenter fumble this transistion. For good reason, it isn’t easy to switch out of PowerPoint, without dropping the ball. Cutting down on the number of mouse-clicks when you make this transition can really remedy a bad transition. This week, I saw Jane Neale of NYLINK demonstrate a nifty little trick that enables the presenter to transition out of PowerPoint smoothly. The trick involves bringing the taskbar to the front of the screen–while PowerPoint is in slide show mode. This trick cuts the number of transition mouse-clicks in half. Here’s how it works. While in presentation mode, hit the “windows” and “tab” keys. This key-stroke brings up the taskbar. Then just pick the application that is minimized to the taskbar–SSSMMOOOOOOTH.