Top Tip Thursday: Polish your presenting skills with PowerPoint Presenter Coach

The feature is available in PowerPoint and helps you to rehearse your presentations in advance, providing feedback that will allow you to enhance your presenting style and deliver more effective presentations.

We all know that there’s nothing worse than someone reading the text word by word from a slide during a presentation. Fortunately, Presenter Coach can detect when you are doing this, and also evaluates your pacing, pitch and use of filler words. The feature also picks up on any words or phrases that might be considered sensitive or inappropriate.

After completing a rehearsal, you will get a report including statistics and suggestions for improvements.

Please note: Presenter Coach is designed to be used for individual speakers, and may not work well with more than one person rehearsing at a time.

Become a PowerPoint pundit: How to use Presenter Coach

To use Presenter Coach:

1. Open your PowerPoint presentation.
2.  In the Slide Show tab, select ‘Rehearse with Coach’. The presentation will open in a full-screen view. When you are ready to begin, click ‘Start Rehearsing’. Ticking the ‘Show real-time feedback’ box will give you on-screen guidance on language, pace and pitch.
3. When you are ready to begin, click ‘Start Rehearsing’. Ticking the ‘Show real-time feedback’ box will give you on-screen guidance on language, pace and pitch.
4.  After you have clicked ‘Start Rehearsing’ wait until ‘Listening…’ appears, you can then start speaking. If you would like a break, hover over the microphone icon. This will then turn into a pause button which you can click to pause your rehearsal.

The rehearsal report

When you have finished your rehearsal, exit the full-screen view. A report will then open that summarises your performance and provides feedback. The report covers a variety of areas:

• Summary – This tells you how long the presentation took in total and how many slides were covered.
• Fillers – Details how many filler words were used such as ‘erm’, ‘ahh’.
• Repetitive language – Identifies any repeated words or phrases to avoid overuse.
• Inclusiveness – Tells you if you have used any words that may be considered sensitive or inappropriate.
• Pace – Advises whether you were reading too quickly, too slowly, or at a good pace
• Pitch – Comments on pitch variation such as changes in tone of voice.
• Originality – Gives examples of slides where you have read text from the slide.

Click the ‘Learn More’ link in each section for more information.

After viewing your results, you can click ‘Rehearse Again’ to practice on the feedback received.

Important note: When you close the rehearsal report it will disappear. If you would like to save a copy, take a screenshot.

Here to help

Be it the internet, email, software, or security, we help businesses supercharge their IT, providing friendly, honest and helpful advice, whilst implementing transparent solutions that helps them get the best from their systems. If you’d like any more information regarding our services, or need help on a specific element of your tech systems, please get in touch at hello@infusetech.co.uk