Top-right of a running deck sits a small strip of controls carrying, in order:
- the position (
7 / 23) and the slide's name, - the elapsed clock and this slide's budget, when you have turned them on,
- previous and next buttons,
- jump to a slide,
- a notes button, on slides that have notes,
- a settings cog,
- and a close button.
It fades away when the pointer sits still and comes back the moment you move it, so a still screen is clean for the room while every control stays one twitch of the mouse away. It stays put while a popover is open, so nothing is ever left stranded over the slide.
Jumping to a slide
Arrow keys walk the deck, which is everything you need until somebody asks about the slide from nine slides ago and you arrow back through nine of them in front of a room.
The jump button (or G) opens the deck as a list, in running order, with the current slide marked. Press any row to go straight there. Hidden slides are not in it, for the same reason they are not in the count: the list is the run, not the deck.
Presenter notes
The notes button opens your notes for this slide in a popover under it, sized so the slide stays readable behind. Press it again, press Esc, or advance the slide to close it.
The button is only there on slides that have notes. Its presence is the signal: no button means nothing to read, which you can tell at a glance without opening anything.
The notes popover is on the screen you are sharing, so the room sees it while it is open. That is the trade for notes being one press away rather than living on a second display.
Pacing a talk
Two optional readouts, both off by default, because a timer nobody asked for is a timer reminding the room you are behind.
- Elapsed counts up from the moment you pressed Present. It is the "am I ten minutes in or twenty" question, answered without a wristwatch.
- Budget shows time-on-this-slide against the minutes you gave that slide when you wrote the deck (see Building a Deck). It turns amber when you go over, and that is all it does: a deck that advanced itself because your four minutes were up would cut off the answer you were giving.
Slides with no budget simply show nothing, so turning it on doesn't clutter the deck with numbers for slides you never timed.
Presenter settings
The presenter settings live in Settings, under Editor then Presenting, so you set them before the talk. The cog in the Slide Deck panel's header opens them too. The cog on screen while you present keeps only what you might change in front of the room: the Transition and its speed, and the two pacing readouts.
Slides
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Slide (the default, the whole screen travelling), Fade (one slide dissolving into the next), or None (a straight cut).
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A speed, Quick, Normal or Slow, which disappears when the transition is None rather than sitting there greyed out.
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Slide Size: Fill Screen (a small slide is blown up) or Actual Size (never past 100%), for authors whose slides are already the size they meant.
Playback
- Auto-Advance, a row of Off, 5s, 10s, 30s and 60s: how often the deck moves on by itself. It pauses while a popover is open, so something you are reading is never swept away by a timer you had forgotten about.
- Click to Advance (on to start): turn it off if you gesture at the screen with the mouse and would rather drive from the keys and buttons alone.
- Loop the Deck: after the last slide, start again instead of ending. With auto-advance, that is the whole "leave it running on the wall" setup.
While Presenting
- Show Position (on to start): turn the counter and slide name off for a clean screen.
- Keep Controls Visible: stop the strip fading when the pointer rests.
- Hide the Pointer (on to start): a still cursor left on a projector is a distraction. It goes and comes back with the controls, so a hidden pointer is never a trap (and with Keep Controls Visible on, the pointer stays too).
- Show Elapsed Time and Show Slide Budget: the two pacing readouts above, also on the cog while you present.
These settings are yours: they follow your account to every device you sign in on (a guest keeps them in this browser). They are how you drive a deck, not part of the document, so a colleague presenting the same deck gets their own.
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