The “On…” series is a collection of short blog posts relating to data visualization, economics, presentation skills, or data communication. In each, I discuss an issue, concept, or idea that I have not fully developed, a work in progress, or just some thoughts about a topic or issue I’d like to share.
There are a lot of aspects to presenting virtually that are important to delivering a great presentation. You should consider your hardware like microphones, webcams, and lighting. And you should get familiar with the software tool you use, whether it’s Zoom, WebEx, Teams, or something else.
In this short post, I wanted to share two quick things about delivering a PowerPoint presentation in Zoom.
First, when sharing my slides, I prefer to use the Portion of Screen setting in the Advanced Tab. This option gives you an adjustable box that you can scale to any size on your screen. When delivering a PowerPoint presentation, this allows you to put the view over the main slide and then you can see all of your other slides to the side. This makes it easier to see your speaker notes and, if you’re running behind or want to skip some slides, you don’t have to quickly click through everything, but instead just select the next slide you want to show.
Second, when using the Portion of Screen settings in Zoom for PowerPoint, it’s like you are working in PowerPoint. This means your audience can see when PowerPoint underlines your typos, names, or other words that are not in its dictionary. So if you are going to use the Portion of Screen option, make sure you turn off the automatic spellcheck! Here’s the Proofing menu in PowerPoint (on Mac) that allows you to turn off the automatic checking.
There are a lot of other skills, techniques, and approaches to giving an effective virtual presentation. Echo Rivera has been doing a great job sharing some of her tips and tricks, so you may want to check out her blog and videos.
I’ll share some more virtual presentation tips and tricks over the coming weeks and months as I keep learning my own approaches and best practices.
I rarely use PowerPoint for presentations any more. First, I feel like I have no control over the PowerPoint presentation environment. Second, most of my presentations are for demonstrations or training in Excel. It is to disprove to have to switch between PowerPoint and Excel, and it is too hard to keep the two in sync.
PowerPoint is a great tool for storyboarding and preparing handouts, and I still use it in this way. But I do my presentations in Excel only. If I need slide-like content, I insert a blank worksheet, copy the slide, and paste it into the worksheet. This way I can easily flow from sheet to sheet, just like slide to slide.
Jonathan – thanks for the post, very helpful indeed. Your suggestion is definitely an elegant and simple solution, but I have read about another option that perhaps enables a bit more of the PowerPoint functionality like builds and animations in the SlideShow view – that you can use on a single screen. Essentially you create two windows for your Powerpoint Presentation (Window/New Window). One Window you can put in SlideShow View, the other in Normal View, or Notes View – however you like to access additional content etc.
In PowerPoint you need to make one setting change from the Menu: Slide Show / Setup Show and click “Browsed by an individual (window)”. What happens then is when you run the SlideShow in PowerPoint, you are presenting in a separate window (not Full Screen), and in Zoom Share Screen you can select just that window. This leaves you free on your desktop to access other content, for example, notes in the same PowerPoint, without forcing yourself out of SlideShow mode. Students, webinar attendees, etc will only see the (essentially) full-screen SlideShow view and can’t see you working in and out of other materials. The key advantage, I see over your admittedly simpler solution, is that it’s also the only way I could see having this capability (of navigating/editing while doing a presentation) if you have builds or animations in your slides. My understanding is you would not necessarily be able to show the builds/animations in the Normal View + Portions of a Screen that you were proposing. (BTW – as they say: long-time fan, first-time commenter – talks, books, blogs all excellent … many thanks. Shoutout to Jon Peltier too, who has helped me vicariously through some tough Excel and DataViz moments).
Thanks, Michael, this is a great option! Being able to use existing animations is really helpful. I’ll be sure to try this out.