Switching Between Applications Within Microsoft PowerPoint

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 browser. I can't tell you the number of times that I have seen a presenter fumble this transition. 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  (originally posted June 30, 2003)

Comments

[Kevin]

Another way to transition between PowerPoint and the Web:

Insert Hyperlinks into your presentation. That will automatically take you to the page desired. Just hit the back button on your browser to go back to the presentation.

Just right click on the text box, picture, etc. and click on "Hyperlink", insert your address.

[Paul]

Good point Kevin, and I just went in to see if one could create a hyperlink to another application or document, and you can, though of course that assumes the ppt is running on the same machine where the document or application lives - wouldn't work so well if you brought the ppt with you to a conference on CD or flash drive...

[John]

Good point. However, using the good old ALT+TAB keystroke achieves the same effect of switching between running apps in Windows without the need for any mouse clicking. BTW, for Macs the same effect is created by the CMD+TAB combo.