It’s not exactly hard, I must admit, and no one anyone except me even knew I was using – which, frankly, is the point. It’s a trick that allows customisation on the fly, using black slides.
I put a lot of black slides in my slide decks, for a number of reasons. Firstly, they act as a great way of getting the audience to focus on me for a while, if I want them to listen to a story, or if I want to run some audience interaction such as dealing with questions. Secondly, they work as very effective ‘end of chapter’ markers, so that the audience gets a clear indication that we’re about to move onto something else.
But there’s also a way of using them that allows instant customisation…
Suppose you need to ‘fork’ your presentation, depending on, say, how your audience says it wants to proceed. If they want to know more about X rather than Y, or whatever. Here’s the trick… have two sets of slides, one for X and one for Y, and separate them with black slides – separated both from each other and from the rest of your slide deck. Go to a black slide as the normal part of your presentation and then decide which set of slides you want to show, X or Y.
Somewhere in your notes (or better yet in your head) or in your presenter view notes you have jotted down the number of the black slide before X and before Y. If your audience decides they need to see the Y slides more than the X slides, you simply type in the number of the appropriate black slide and hit the return key.
Your slide deck magically jumps to that black slide from the one you’re showing. And because one black slide looks just like another, your audience is no wiser. It saves all that skipping around slides and looking like an amateur! It also makes you look like you knew all along what the audience was going to need to hear, because as far as they’re concerned you’re just moving on slides in the normal progression.
Magic.
It’s particularly useful for when you take questions. You guess what the questions are that you’re likely to be asked and prepare slides which address each of those in turn and separate them with black slides – and then magically jump around between the black slides without your audience being any the wiser that the order they’re asking questions is not the order of your slides.
You look more than a little classy :)
I really like this tip – I’m a big fan of the black slide! I especially like the idea of black slide acting as a “fork”. It lends itself to the idea that your presentation can be adapted in-flight to truly meet the needs of your audience. I’d imagine that this takes a lot of lot of skill and preparation but definitely effective if it comes off!