Good presenters always rehearse their presentations well but there’s often one more thing that helps them deliver flawless presentation – speaker notes.

While the regular presentation slides are shown on the main screen for the audience, the view on the presenter’s computer screen is slightly different – he can not only see the current slide but also the text notes and other key points that should be discussed with that slide.

If you would like to have something similar for your next presentation, all you need is a copy of Microsoft PowerPoint on your laptop computer that should be connected to a larger screen where the presentation would be shown to the audience.

Open the presentation file inside PowerPoint, go to the Slide Show tab and check the option that says “Use Presenter View.” If you are running an older version of PowerPoint, this setting would be available under the Slide Show menu – > Set Up show. Also make sure that the “Show on” option is set to the other large screen and not your own current monitor.

That’s it. Hit F5 to launch the presentation and here’s what your audience will see..

..and the next screenshot is your own screen. You get a view of the current slide, your text notes (so that you don’t forget any important point) as well as a hint of your upcoming slides.

If the notes aren’t readable enough from a distance, you can always zoom-in to increase the font size or drag the separator left to make the text pane even bigger.

This feature, known as Presenter View, has always been a part of PowerPoint but don’t think enough presenters seem to take advantage of it. A big thanks to Doug Thomas for bringing it up in his video on making better PowerPoint Presentations which is also embedded below.