How to create a short version of a long presentation

The problem

Presentations can be long, very long. Yet we are often forced to cut down our presentations. Customers are pulled into other meetings, the event is delayed, and some other speaker needs to be accommodated. Whatever may be the reason, we land into a problem.

The problem is – how to suddenly cut the presentation short?

In this situation, most of us start the presentation as usual, and skip unwanted slides in front of the audience. Audience does not appreciate this, nor does your presentation look very professional.

The solution is to be PREPARED for such situations. Read ahead to find out how…

The solution

The solution is simple. But it requires preparation. It cannot be done at the 11^th hour.

When you finish creating a long presentation, create its short version as well. It takes few extra minutes but prevents future problems.

You must select only the important slides and save them as a shorter version. But wait. I am not asking you to copy paste important slides into a new presentation. That would be counter-productive.

Fortunately, PowerPoint has a great facility called Custom Show.

Create a custom show

1. Click on Slide Show tab and Custom Show button
2. Choose Custom Shows … The Custom Show dialog will be empty because
   we have not created a custom show before

1. Click the New button
2. Now a dialog appears
3. Specify a name for the custom show
4. Available slides are shown on the left slide and selected slides on right
5. Select the slides you want and move them to the right side
6. Double click a slide to select it
7. Select multiple slides by pressing Shift or Ctrl while dragging and move them together. Click on Add button to add these slides to custom show
8. It is possible to insert the same slide multiple times
   This is required if you want to repeat the agenda slide before showing details
9. When you finish selecting the key slides, click Ok
10. Now the custom show is ready

Office 2013 makes this process even easier by providing a checkbox for each item in the lists.

How to deliver the custom presentation?

This is easy. Just open the Custom Show dropdown. You will notice that our newly created custom show I s available there. Click on it to run the custom show.

Now PowerPoint will show only custom show slides. You don’t need to waste time skipping slides and the audience also realizes that you are prepared for this eventuality.

Other scenarios where you will benefit from Custom Shows

1. Custom show for Related topics
Suppose you are conducting a presentation on topic X. To understand topic X, the audience needs to know topic Y. But you realize that nobody knows Y. Now what should be done? Ideally, you should have a mini-presentation for topic Y created as a custom show.

2. Interactive Presentation
Sometimes we want to cover many topics, but not in a particular order.
We can then create a simple Agenda slide and ask the audience which topics they want. Now we need a hyperlink to jump to the desired topic.
In this case do not use regular hyperlinks. Instead, create a custom show for each topic. Hyperlink dialog also allows you to jump to a custom show – run those slides and then come back to the base agenda slide. This way you can create interactive, free flowing presentations easily. I will cover this in a separate article later.

Related topic : Sections

Since Office 2010, PowerPoint allows you to create sections within your presentations.

Right click at the position where you want to segregate slides and choose Add Section. Remember to rename it immediately.

Ideally you should add sections at the time of creating or assembling the presentation.
Sections are going to represent the key areas, topics or segments of your presentation.

Benefits while editing a presentation

1. You can expand or collapse sections to make it easier to manage long presentations
2. You can also move entire sections to rearrange the presentation quickly
3. Click  on the section name to select all the slides within it quickly

Benefits while delivering a presentation

With Office 2010, right click menu shows you Go to Custom Show as well as Go To Sections – providing you full flexibility.

In 2013 version, the Section selection is not available. This is because, PowerPoint 2013 allows you to zoom in and out from a slide. If you zoom out (try to make the slide smaller), it moves to slide sorter view. In this view, all sections are visible.

When to use which one?

Both have their place and relevance. Custom show gives you full flexibility and even allows you to show the  same slide multiple times without copy paste.

Sections is more useful for operational organization because sections can only be created based upon contiguous slides.

Try both and you will find it easier to manage the presentations.

In fact you should first start with sections and then fill slides into them. This way, the structure of the presentation never gets disturbed.

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