InDesign Presentation Mode

InDesign CC 2014 adds a new screen mode: Presentation.

You can enter Presentation mode in a couple of ways. From the menu bar, select View > Screen Mode > Presentation. I often to use the button at the bottom of the Tool Palette to switch screen modes. And if you are a keyboard shortcut person, "shift+W" will do the trick. (Don't worry, pressing "W" by itself still gets you into Preview mode.)

So, what is Presentation mode? It hides the palettes and toolbar and displays only your InDesign document surrounded by black. You can page between them using arrow keys. Or you can click to advance and shift-click to go back. It's very similar to Full Screen Mode in Acrobat.

Presentation mode will be helpful when showing artwork to clients and coworkers. And if you are like me and build "PowerPoint" presentations in InDesign, it will be nice to preview your artwork in full screen mode before you export to PDF.

Could you actually use InDesign to show a presentation? I suppose you could. Although it seems clear to me that isn't Adobe's intention with the feature. Users can add transitions in InDesign that export with a PDF file. Those transitions aren't shown in Presentation mode. If Adobe intended for you to use this mode to show presentations, they would have supported transitions. For building presentations in InDesign, your best bet is still to export a PDF and present in Acrobat.

On Wednesday's, I post quick tips for Adobe apps.

Fuzzy PowerPoint Math

A little math problem for you…

One 15-minute PowerPoint* presentation has 5 slides. Another 15-minute PowerPoint presentation has 15 slides. Which presentation is shorter?

Obviously, both are 15-minute presentations. They are the same length.

But time and again, I talk to people who reduce the number of slides in their PowerPoint because they want to make the presentation “shorter.” They think that if they have fewer slides, they will talk for a shorter amount of time. Often, they don’t take material out, as much as they condense it on the remaining slides.**

That’s completely the wrong way to think about it.

Next time you have a presentation, think about how long you have to present and build your story to fill the allotted time. Then create an appropriate number of slides to support your presentation. You may have more slides and move through them quickly. Or only a handful of slides.

But remember that the length of your presentation has almost nothing to do with how many slides you have.

* This applies to you even if you are using Keynote, Prezi or a PDF.

** I’ve seen people cut slides and have their presentations grow longer, rambling as they try to squeeze in all that they’ve “cut.”