How to use Presenter Coach to improve your PowerPoint presentations

The Presenter Coach can analyze and evaluate your spoken Microsoft PowerPoint presentations to help you improve them.

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If you need help describing your Microsoft PowerPoint presentations and you use PowerPoint on the Internet, you have access to a handy feature called Presenter Coach. The coach monitors and analyzes your speech and words while you give your presentation and goes from one slide to the other. After you are done, the coach will submit a rehearsal report on how you were doing. The report shows the total time and number of slides that you have covered, and it ranks you by your average pace and warnings as you read easily from each slide. You can also discover whether you have used fill words or sensitive sentences.

Follow these step-by-step instructions for using the PowerPoint Presenter Coach feature.

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First make sure that your presentation is available online via Microsoft OneDrive. Browse to PowerPoint on the web, sign in and open the presentation that you want to rehearse. If you don’t see it, click the More link in OneDrive and locate the file in your OneDrive storage. If the file is not online, upload it by dragging it to the file list or by clicking on the link to Upload and open (Figure A).

Figure A

After opening your presentation, click on the Slide Show tab and select the button to practice with Coach (Figure B).

Figure B

When PowerPoint asks for permission to use your computer’s microphone, click Allow. You may need to click the Rehearse With Coach button again. A small welcome window appears at the bottom right. Click the button to start rehearsing (Figure C).

Figure C

Start the presentation of your presentation. After talking about the content on one slide, click with your left mouse button to go to the next slide. While you tell your presentation, the Coach offers suggestions. It can tell you to avoid reading directly from the slides or using fill words such as “umm” and “uhh” (Figure D).

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Figure D

You can go through the entire presentation until you are done. If you want to take a break or see how you’ve done it so far, move your mouse over the microphone icon until it changes to a Pause button and click on it. Click on the same button to continue. Press the Esc key to stop; our practice report appears with suggestions and statistics about your performance (Figure E).

Figure E

The Summary section indicates how long the presentation lasted and how many slides you covered. The Originality section alerts you to prevent reading the slides and displays slides that you may want to re-practice. Your time and cadence are displayed in the Tempo section.

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The Sensitive Phrases section indicates whether you have used words or phrases that may be considered sensitive or inappropriate. The Fillers section warns you if you have used too many filler words. Click on the More information link in each section for more information. If you want to continue, click the button to repeat again. The presentation is opened on the slide where you left off, so you can continue with your performance.

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