After fixing my work laptop to work nicely with a projector, I was reminded today of the beauty of using Visio for presentations. The secret? F5.
F5 is going to give you a full screen view of the page (without the guides and grid). If you have a multiple page document, you can go back and forth with the arrow keys. The up and right arrows move you forward. The down and left arrows take you to the previous page. I think that I’ve successfully gone without using PowerPoint for any presentation for more than three years with this trick.
I wouldn’t do this with just any document. You have to think about the proportions of the page in Visio. Do they suit an 800 x 600 pixel projector? Letter (8.5″ x 11″) pages are perfect for this when they’re landscape. When the aspect ratio of your page is different from the projector, you’re going to get a border that may make the text too small to read.
If you drag shapes off the page (I tend to do this instead of deleting because you never know…) and your aspect ratio is off, they’re going to be visible when you go to full-screen mode. If you just drag black text off to the side, it’s not going to show up at all. Check it out before you actually do this in a presentation.
[…] in a meeting. You show a Visio document with F5. Everyone likes it. When you get back to your desk, your computer has frozen and you have to do a […]
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