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Cliff Atkinson presents on “How to let go of notes and speak from the heart”

September 17, 2011 by Ellen Finkelstein 3 Comments

At the 2nd session of Outstanding Presentations Workshop, Cliff Atkinson presented on “Speaking from Presence: How to let go of notes and speak from the heart.”

Some of the points he made:

Research shows that people make decisions emotionally and back them up with data
Emotion isn’t on the slide; it’s in your heart
To help you from being so nervous when you present, focus on your breathing to settle down and shift from your mind to your body
Be yourself and express your experience, even if it is “I am so nervous!” This relieves some of the stress.
Storytelling involves expressing content in the form of your own experience.
Have your most important point identified, then your 3 most important points.

Cliff intrigued everyone by using a tablet PC and writing on the screen with the PC’s stylus as he spoke. This made the presentation feel very interactive and impromptu. Here’s an example:

If you haven’t signed up yet, you’re missing a lot! The next sessions will be on Wednesday, September 28th. You can sign up at www.outstandingpresentationsworkshop.com.

Create notes as you deliver in PowerPoint 2003

January 15, 2004 by Ellen Finkelstein Leave a Comment

If you are delivering a presentation and get feedback, ideas, projects to do, and so on, you can immediately enter them into your presentation using the Speaker Notes feature.

Since the Meeting Minder was eliminated in PowerPoint 2003, Speaker Notes is the only way to add to your presentation in Slide Show view.

While in Slide Show view, right-click and choose Screen > Speaker Notes.

Type your content and click Close. The text is immediately saved in the Notes pane of the current slide.

However, Speaker Notes were removed in PowerPoint 2007. See the first tip below for a technique you can use.

Related tips:

Add notes during a presentation (includes a technique for PowerPoint 2007)
Creating a compact set of notes
Create slides from audience input

Creating a Compact List of Notes

December 15, 2003 by Ellen Finkelstein Leave a Comment

If you have added notes to your slides that you want to print out to use while you present, using the Print feature (choose File>Print and choose Notes Pages from the Print What drop-down list) creates a separate sheet for each slide. It’s a big waste of paper and awkward to handle during your delivery. Here’s another method that will fit 5 slides per page if you want to see the slide and much more if you can work without the slide image.

Choose File>Send To>Microsoft Office Word.
In the dialog box, choose the Notes Next to Slides option and click OK.
Wait while Word opens and imports the presentation into a table. Note that there’s a lot of space below each slide and you have only 3 slides per page.
In Word, with the cursor anywhere in the table, choose Table>Select>Table to select the entire table.
Choose Table>Table Properties and click the Row tab.
Uncheck the Specify Height checkbox in the Size section of the dialog box.
Click OK. You now have 5 slides per page.
If you want to remove the slide images, you can get much more on a page, of course. Click in the column containing the slide images and choose Table>Select>Column.
Choose Table>Delete>Columns. You’re left with the slide numbers and their notes.

Add notes in PowerPoint in Slide Show view

March 14, 2001 by Ellen Finkelstein 23 Comments

It’s not unusual for a speaker to need to write down notes during a presentation, especially in a meeting environment–without going out of Slide Show view. For example, you might want to keep track of decisions made, actions steps to take (and who should take them), questions/suggestions from the audience, and so on.

PowerPoint used to contain features to allow this, but PowerPoint 2007 removed the last one. I think these features are very useful, but Microsoft apparently doesn’t. I assume that their research showed that people didn’t use them. You now need to return to pen and paper — or do you?

How to add notes in PowerPoint in Slide Show view

You can use an advanced feature of PowerPoint to create a text box that lets you type while in Slide Show view. Note: I’ve adapted this technique from a post that Sonia Coleman wrote a long time ago.

Create your presentation.
You need to display the Developer tab, which isn’t displayed by default. To display it, click the File/Office button at the upper-left corner, and choose Options or PowerPoint Options. In PowerPoint 2007, on the Popular pane, check the Show Developer Tab in the Ribton check box. In PowerPoint 2010 and 2013, choose Customize ribbon and on the right side, check the Developer check box. Click OK.
Display the slide where you want to be able to type in Slide Show view.
Click the Developer tab. Click the Text Box button in the Controls group (it has the letters ab in it) and drag a rectangle on your slide with enough width to comfortably enter notes.
With the text box selected, right-click and choose Properties or Property Sheet. Change the settings marked with arrows as shown here:

EnterKeyBehavior: Set to True so that pressing Enter starts a new line.
MultiLine: Set to True so that the text box can have multiple lines of text.
ScrollBars: If you might have a lot of text, use the 2-fmScrollBarsVertical option to display a vertical scrollbar when you add enough text.
SpecialEffect: To create a magical effect, choose 0-fmSpecialEffectFlat, which makes the text box invisible. No one will know how you can type on the slide! (Thanks to Ken Molay of Webinar Success for this tip.
Value: Provides pre-entered text if you want it. For example, you could enter the topic of the meeting.

Feel free to play with the other settings to see if they’re useful to you.

Close the Properties window by clicking its Close button.

Test and use the text box

Test the presentation. You should be able to type text in the text box. If you add text to test the text box, you can always delete it in Normal view.

When you present, just click in the box and start typing. You can’t format the text, but you can start a new line by pressing Enter (thanks to the EnterKeyBehavior setting).

After the presentation, when you return to Normal view, you’ll be prompted to save the file when you close it. Saving the file will save the notes. If you don’t want to save the notes (perhaps you want to use the presentation again and want the text box to be empty), don’t save the file.

Later, you can open the file in Normal view. To copy and paste the notes, select the text box, right-click, and choose TextBox Object > Edit. You’ll now be able to select the text, copy it, and paste it. You can also delete the text so that the text box is blank for the next time you use it.