How to set up "Presenter View" in Powerpoint

Earlier this afternoon I helped a friend (Tony) with a couple of Microsoft Outlook problems (mainly due to the immense size of his .pst file!) when I happened to show him a couple tricks of the trade. Tony has used Microsoft Powerpoint to present to audiences all over the place for years hence I was surprised that he didn't know about "Presenter View" - he's not alone therefore I've written up what I showed him as follows...

It's amazing quite how few regular presenters know about Powerpoint's "Presenter View" - it's been around for years - I think back to Office '97 but I'm sure someone will correct me if that's not exact.

"Presenter View" is a really handy feature of Powerpoint that uses the operating system's dual screen facility to show the speaker additional information whilst presenting including slide notes, timings and a glimse of the slides that are to come. It works with both Windows XP and Windows Vista.

On Windows Vista: if you have plugged in an external display (monitor or projector) and don't get the following panel (or want to bring it back up to make changes) then simply press the "Windows" / "flag" key and "X"

Click on "Connect Display" to reveal the following:

Select "Show different parts of my desktop on each display (extended)" - the default is "Duplicate..."

All being well you'll now be running in dual screen - the external display will currently show just your desktop wallpaper.

For 2007 Office System (there's a very similar setting in previous versions of Office): Open a presentation, select "slide show" followed by "Set up slideshow" to reveal a screen similar to the following

Enable "Show Presenter View" followed by "OK". Finally run the presentation as normal - you should see something like the following image. Note: the image is actually showing both displays - the right hand half is actually what's shown on the external display