Part II The Elusive Power Point

When you are the person behind the computer during a meeting or worship service. The person behind the scenes (maybe even at the back of the room) who is pressing the up arrow and following along with the words of the song or an outline of a sermon. Usually it’s a no brainer, press the up arrow at the right time. But it’s being prepared for those unexpected turns, like the worship leader decides to sing a chorus one more time.. what are my options.

Preparation is the one of the keys to success. Now knowing which key to hit is important, and it’s part of preparation, we will cover that later. When I talk about preparation is knowing what slides are in the deck, reviewing them before anyone starts talking. The best way to do a good job is knowing your options. I suggest also you print out the slides in the deck on paper to have at hand. Make notes, and even ask your worship leader where there might be some sway. He/she might not know, but might have a good idea. Knowing the slide numbers is also very important, as I’ll show you later in this blog. During a slideshow you can hop around, but you need to know where to hop.

Knowing the keys, the keys on the keyboard. Here is a list of slide show keys and I’ll go into more detail later:

Ø F5 Begin the slide show

Ø Esc End the slide show

Ø B Black Screen show\hide

Ø W White Screen show\hide

Ø N Next slide

Ø Up arrow Next slide

Ø P Previous slide

Ø Down arrow Next slide

Ø 01 on number keyboard Slide 1

Ø 12 on number keyboard slide 12.. for each slide

Knowing the number of the slide, if you need to hop just type in the number of the slide… Here’s a great example… The service is running late, the worship leader during the hymn says “last verse”, but the slide is on the last line of the first verse and there are two more verses in between, do you press N N N N? No, you’ve got your printout with slide 34 being the start of the last verse, just type 34 on the numeric keypad. Simple, and you look like the pro!

Next time – Timing for an automatic show!

Help me with Power Point-- Part I

Years ago I visited a church where they had an overhead projector and a lady at the front switched through the cells (sheets) with lyrics of the songs or the words of the hymn being sung. The pastor on certain Sundays would even use it for his outline. At the time I thought, well this is really cool because people are standing and looking up instead of looking down at a hymnal. Power Point was a brand new program and it could print out the slides, which in turn you would use a thermostatic copier to make the cells for the overhead. Later this church upgraded to a slide projector, and a person would actually use an early version of power point with colored backgrounds and make a more professional slide by taking a picture of the screen with a 35mm camera and printing the slides. Not bad and really high tech. Then came the LCD Projector, the one device which made it so you could actually project the image directly from the computer onto the screen with no transfer. So is that all that changed?
In this article I want to touch on the fact that now with the automation of power point you can actually do a lot more than move the slides forward and backwards. With the overhead you always had the option of jumping to a different slide, there was an order, but it was loose, literally. If you happened to drop the slides, you would have to identify the next one (which could take time). If you wanted to have a hymn sing, it was easy (just alphabetize all the slides in a box). Then came the slide projector, the service became much more ordered because you could only move forward and backwards. If you wanted to change the order, you would either have to backup or jump forward several slides. What's new? Many people today think that power point is very much like that old slide projector (except no need to make the 35mm slides). In the next part of this blog series I hope to show you how you can maximize your performance during a presentation. How to loosen up and go with the flow rather than getting embarrassed because the worship leader felt he should sing the refrain again (this happens a ton!).