About delivering presentations

You can use all of the PowerPoint special effects and features to make an on-screen (electronic) presentation exciting and complete. You can use slide transitions, timings, movies, sounds, animation, hyperlinks, and smart tags. After you decide that you are going to use a computer to give your presentation, you have several options on how to deliver it.

Presentation with a live speaker    Presenting in a large room by using a monitor or projector is the most common way of delivering presentations. The speaker has complete control of the show and can run the show automatically or manually and even record narration as the show progresses.

Self-running presentation    You might want to set up a presentation to run unattended in a booth or kiosk at a trade show or convention. You can make most controls unavailable so that users can't make changes to the presentation. A self-running presentation can restart when it's finished and also when it's been idle on a manually advanced slide for longer than five minutes.

Collaborative meetings    Using the Microsoft NetMeeting program with PowerPoint allows you to share a presentation and exchange information with people at different sites in real time as if everyone were in the same room.

In a NetMeeting conference, you can share programs and documents, send text messages in Chat, transfer files, and work on the Whiteboard. By collaborating, participants can take control of the presentation to review and edit its contents. During the meeting, only one person can control the presentation at a time, but multiple users can work in Chat or on the Whiteboard simultaneously if collaboration is turned on.

Presentation broadcasting    You can broadcast a presentation, including video and audio, over the Web. You can use broadcasting for a company meeting, presenting to remote groups, or holding a team meeting whose participants are at several locations. By using Microsoft Outlook or any other e-mail program, you schedule the broadcast just like any other meeting. The presentation is saved in Hypertext Markup Language (HTML) format, so all that your audience needs in order to see the presentation is Microsoft Internet Explorer 5.0 or later. The broadcast can be recorded and saved on a Web server where it's available for playback at any time.

Presentations on the Web or intranet    You can design your presentation specifically for the World Wide Web or intranet, by publishing it as a web page. To publish a presentation means to place a copy of the presentation in HTML format on the Web. You can publish copies of the same presentation to different locations. You can publish a complete presentation, a custom show, a single slide, or a range of slides. Because navigation is a critical element in a presentation, PowerPoint presentations in HTML format include a link bar that you can use to move through the slides by using the outline pane. Speaker notes are also visible to all viewers in a presentation published to the Web, so you can use that feature like a caption.

You can create a presentation that uses overhead transparencies by printing your slides as black-and-white or color transparencies. You can design these slides in either landscape or portrait orientation.

You can design your presentation so that it looks great both on the screen in color and when printed in grayscale or pure black and white on a laser printer.

A service bureau can transform your electronic slides into 35mm slides. Contact your local service bureau for instructions.

To support your presentation, you can give your audience handouts— smaller versions of your slides that are printed in a variety of layouts. You can also print your speaker notes for the audience. And, as you're working on a presentation, you can print your outline, including slide titles and main points.