If you’ve ever needed to pause your presentation midway through and found it difficult to bring your audience’s attention away from your slides and back onto you, you need to learn this handy keyboard shortcut.
Microsoft knows that sometimes it’s useful to have a completely blank screen during a PowerPoint presentation. Doing so draws the audience’s attention away from the slides and straight onto the presenter. That’s why they put one at the end of every single presentation.
Sometimes, for one reason or another, you might need to pause your presentation midway through. This might be because someone in your audience wants to ask a question. Or perhaps you want to take a quick break in a longer session. You might even just want your audience to focus on only you for a second.
In these situations, it’s really handy to be able to remove any distractions on the slides behind/beside you. However, relatively few people know that it’s super easy to bring up a blank white or black screen at any point during the presentation with a simple keystroke.
It’s as easy as 1, 2, B
Blacking out (or whiting out) a presentation, at any time, is as easy as pressing B (for a black screen) or W (for a white screen). These blank screens will temporarily hide the current slide, helping the presenter to grab their audience’s focus. To get back to where you left off, you simply need to press B or W again.
Putting a blank slide on the screen in this incredibly simple way has a variety of different benefits. If someone stops you to ask a question that’s not relevant to the slide you’re currently on, it will remove any distracting, unrelated information and allow you and the audience to focus on the question at hand.
Or, if your audience is looking weary and you decide to take an unplanned break, you can cover up your content, let them rest their minds and return to it with ease afterwards.
B for black
Pressing B for black or W for white is a quick and easy way to direct your audience’s attention away from your slides, and back to you. Whatever the reason, it will help you to bring clarity to your presentation, remove unnecessary distractions, and ensure the focus of your talk remains on you.
If you need help putting together a killer presentation, get in touch with us today. From expertly designed slides, to damn-clever PowerPoint development, no one does presentations like we do.