Blank the ppt

Dear Friends

We will embark on a journey to make our daily work more efficient and effective by means of simple tricks and tips that could be implemented on day to day basis. I am grateful to our association for providing me this opportunity to share with all of you, my knowledge on day to day office applications such as excel, power-point, word, etc. This is the first of the articles that would follow, which will discuss various functionalities in these applications that would be useful to all of us. All our discussions would revolve around a person called ‘Bahadur Singh’.

Let me give you a brief introduction of Bahadur Singh. Mr. Bahadur Singh is a management graduate with specialisation in finance. He works as an analyst in one of the leading research firm. Physically short and stout he is a sweet person with a great sense of humour. While he carries his day to day activities, he comes across various problems, which we could have also encountered in our day to day life. Whenever he has some problem he comes to us for a solution. In all my next articles we will study the various problems that he faces and how the same are resolved using simple functions available with us.

In this first article we would discuss a very small tip in power-point that many of us would not be aware of.

Bahadur Singh has been given an assignment to find a FMCG company that could be taken over. Our dear friend has spent all night working with huge data and is ready for a presentation to the top management. In the midst of the presentation there is a slide that involves some discussion among the people in the boardroom and some calculations that he would like to do on the board with the help of marker pens. While the discussion is going on our friend has to do something to hide the presentation being focused on the board or what we can say he wants the screen to go black. What does he do?
ü Covers the lens of proxima with a paper or a book or a lens cover.
ü Switches off his computer.
ü Press Function + F5 keys together or switch of the proxima.

The problem that Bahadur Singh faces is not unique. All of us have this problem whenever we are giving any presentation to a close group of people or may be in a seminar. Our friend knows the above three solutions to his problem but are these solutions the best one or can there be a better solution. Bahadur Singh comes to us and asks the same question. Let us see the disadvantage of each of the above solution:
ü The process of covering the lens of proxima is very common. However the book that is used to cover the same may fall or the paper may fly. Also there is a possibility that there is no place to keep the object. All the proximas have a lens cover, which could also be used. But even this may not be possible as the proxima at times may be placed at a height that u cannot reach or even after covering it with the lens cover, the presentation screen does not go perfect black as there is still some dim light coming.
ü Switching off the computer is something that a few people do but all of us agree that this is not an elegant way for the same. The moment you want to start the presentation again you would need to start the computer which will be a time consuming process.
ü Pressing of Function + F5 is the best among the three solutions above. Technically, this would break the connection between the computer and proxima. However, the computer monitor still remains on and at times that might have an irk some people in the board-room. Also when one wants to start the presentation again, he presses Function + F5 again, to enable the connection which might take time. Similarly you would agree that switching off the proxima would also not be the most effective solution and may damage the proxima, if done frequently.

As we said earlier, can we provide some better solution to Bahadur Singh, so that he can make the presentation screen and the monitor go blank to enable some discussion

Well here it goes, while the power-point slide show is still on, just press the alphabet ‘b’ on the keyboard. Try this and having discussions during presentations would not be as difficult as it has been. Bahadur Singh went back happily with this solution and was successful in convincing the top management for the proposed takeover.

Hope this helps all of you as it did to our friend. We will see this and much more as days go by. Logging off my first article here.