 Hey folks, in this quick video, I'm going to show you the process of setting up a PowerPoint presentation for a speech and then using that PowerPoint presentation over Zoom. Let's go ahead and get to it. So on my screen right now, I have a basic PowerPoint presentation that is set up in the reveal, conceal method of using PowerPoint slides in a speech. This is a really common way that folks will use PowerPoint slides during a presentation because it allows them to bring up content. Bring that content and then put it away so that that content doesn't become a distraction to their audience. The basic tenets of the reveal, conceal method are to set up PowerPoint slides over here on the left and to have one more slide than twice the number that you need. So if you're going to have three slides like I have set up here, then you're going to want to have twice that number six plus one for a total of seven. What this allows you to do is to put blank slides in between each of your visual aids for your presentation. And then as you're giving your presentation, it makes it really easy to go ahead and pull that up, have a blank screen when you're not talking about a VA, but then to be able to pull the visual aid up, explain it and make it go away without a lot of trouble. I know that some remotes and technology tools can do the same thing, but this is kind of a high tech, low tech method to go ahead and do that same thing. One thing that I do want to mention is that earlier versions of Zoom sometimes had difficulty anytime someone would share their screen and have a completely black blank screen. My understanding of why that happened is that they were worried that folks' bandwidth was ultimately preventing them from seeing what was being displayed on the screen and that would lead to a feature in Zoom where they would keep the screen frozen when it would go black. But the problem with that is that it keeps up the previous slide when you're trying to put it away. One method that I've discovered to kind of make this problem go away is obviously just update your Zoom to the most recent version. But absent that because you don't know what your audience has got on their computers is instead of using blank black slides between each slide is to go ahead and edit the background on your blank slides and instead of choosing pure black, go into the color options and choose one shade lighter. So it's this kind of like dark gray at gray color. And by doing this on all of your blank slides, it then makes it so that Zoom will never use that feature and freeze the previous slide when you attempt to change it to the black blank slide and thus not distract your audience. So we've got a PowerPoint that's all set up. And again, you can see that I've got my slides here, alternating between blank slides and the visual aids that I would want to use in this speech. Let's go ahead and switch over now to Zoom and I'll show you a little bit about how you would then present these slides during a speech presentation. All right, folks. So I've got a basic Zoom meeting open. I haven't done anything special other than just pulling up a Zoom Zoom session. It is set to cloud record because mine does that, but don't worry about that. So I'm going to walk you through the process now of sharing your PowerPoint presentation and then kind of showing you that reveal, conceal method. So the first thing that you want to do is down on the bottom here, you can see that there is the screen icon that has a square box, an up arrow, and it says share screen. There is a little carrot here that gives you some options for advanced things, but we don't need to do that just to share a basic PowerPoint presentation. So go ahead and click on that button. And then if you have multiple monitors like I do, it is going to ask you which screen you want to share. However, if you just have a single monitor, there's just going to be an option for screen. Now it is possible to go in and like choose just the PowerPoint app. There are some times where that might be beneficial, but more often than not, you're going to have less problems if you just select your main screen that your PowerPoint presentation is on. So for me, that's screen number one. I'm going to go ahead and click that. And then I'm going to click the share button down in the bottom right hand corner. I'm not going to go ahead and share sound or optimize video clips because I'm not doing anything fancy other than showing some basic visual aids. But if you were going to show video clips in your presentation, then you would want to optimize that video clip and share sound. But since I'm not doing that, let's go ahead and click share. All right, so now you can see that I've got my PowerPoint presentation open and shared on the screen. But I want to go ahead and put that into presentation mode. A bunch of different ways to do this in PowerPoint. You can click slide show. You can click the start button up here. I'm fond of this one in the bottom right hand corner. But however you start the presentation is fine. So I'm going to go ahead and click on that. And you can now see that in presentation mode. And since I set my first slide to be that blank gray slide, it appears that there's nothing on the screen. And for the most part, my audience will be paying attention to me, the speaker. However, with the reveal conceal method, the idea is when I'm ready to show off one of my presentations, I would then go ahead and click the next button on my presentation. And bam, the slide that I want to share opens up. At this point, while giving my speech, I would turn to my VA and be like, great, let's go ahead and take a look at the diagram that I have on screen. I would walk folks through a little bit of what they're seeing. And when I'm done explaining the visual aid, I'm going to go ahead and click the next button again. And that's going to turn that screen off so that my audience is no longer distracted by that image. And they're again paying attention to me, the speaker. And when I'm ready to bring up my next visual aid, for example, a vivid full screen image of what sequestered carbon looks like, I again would bring that up, explain it. And when I'm done with it, I can put it away and continue this process as I move through my speech until I'm ultimately done. And then I can leave the visual aids on the gray screen until my speech is over. And at that point, I can go ahead and stop share and turn it over to the next person. Well, I hope this tutorial has been helpful for you. The process of sharing PowerPoint slides is obviously not super difficult, but if you're having trouble with it, by all means, feel free to leave a comment. All right, thanks for watching, everyone, and have a great day.