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)
