Office 2008 for Macintosh: The Missing Manual

Recycling Your Presentations

PowerPoint lets you create multiple custom shows in a single document. This feature comes in handy if, for example, you want to have both long and abbreviated versions of the same show, or if you want to tailor some material you’ve used before to a different audience.

Suppose you’re going to address two different groups on the topic of deer. You have lots of engaging slides on the topic. But there’s a good chance the Bambi Fan Club won’t sit through the show you’ve got planned for Hunters Anonymous. You can solve this moral dilemma by creating a customized show for each group, each of whose slides are a subset of the complete deer presentation.

Figure 17-7. Presenter Tools divides the screen into three panes, much like Normal view. The largest, at the top, shows you exactly what the audience sees, in real time. The pane on the left shows thumbnails of the entire presentation; to go to any slide, click it. The notes pane at the bottom shows your slide notes; the pop-up menu directly above it lets you increase the font size for readability. The Up Next window shows the next animation on the current slide or the next slide in the presentation. In the lower-right corner, you’ll find buttons to switch the clock from a clock to a timer, to hide or show the Up Next window, to end the slideshow, or to open the Presenter Tools Help screen with a list of keyboard ...