If you're somebody who frequently needs to present slide decks to an audience, and you wanna get real time feedback on exactly how good your presentation is, then you need to know about the Rehearse with Coach feature in Microsoft PowerPoint. Because this underutilised feature is going to give you real time feedback on things like the pace of your presentation, whether you're using filler words and suggest some improvements that you can make.
So this is definitely something that you are gonna want to add to your preparation routine. Let's take a look at it. So I've opened up a PowerPoint presentation and you're going to find the Rehearse with Coach option on the slideshow ribbon where you are gonna find the rest of your presentation tools.
Here it is just here, it's in the Rehearse group. We're gonna click Rehearse with Coach. Now what this does is it immediately puts you into slide show view. And if you notice down in the corner, we now have this little box popup that says Start rehearsing. Also, notice I have show realtime feedback checked, so as soon as we click on start rehearsing PowerPoint is now listening to everything that I'm saying.
So it's at this point where you start to run through your presentation and practice. So if I'm going to be presenting this to an audience, I would start reading through exactly what I want to say. So let's just do the first paragraph. You are part of a team tasked with planning a community event called Tech for Good Fair.
The event will showcase local startups. Workshops and talks about how technology can solve social challenges. Now I just wanna pause there for a second. I dunno if you noticed in the little box at the bottom it told me that I was doing a really good job. So now it's telling me, try to speak a bit slower.
Now this is because I have that real time feedback box checked, so I'm going to now finish off this paragraph. Just speaking slightly slower. The team needs to stay organised, track tasks, and collaborate effectively. So the coaching feature is going to keep checking all of the elements of what I'm saying.
It's gonna give me real time feedback. And then once I finished practicing my presentation, I can simply press the escape key on my keyboard and it's going to load up a full rehearsal report. So I'm getting a summary just here. It tells me how many slides I rehearsed. It's telling me if I've used filler word and it's telling me that I didn't use too many, it's checking repetitive language, inclusiveness, the pitch, whether I'm monotone or not, and it's telling me my average pace over time.
And all of these sections have a little learn more links. If you want to delve into anything a little bit deeper, then you can. And of course if you want to check this report and make some modifications, you can simply click the Rehearse Again button in the top corner and see if your presentation is any better the second time round.
So I think this is a really nice little feature of PowerPoint that not many people utilise. It's definitely a game changer, particularly if you're somebody who's not used to presenting to large audiences.
