Presentations gets a fullscreen present mode

Delivering a deck should take no attention away from the room. Present mode opens the deck fullscreen with a presenter view beside it: the current slide, the speaker notes for that slide, and a timer counting the minutes you have actually used rather than the ones you planned.

What present mode gives you

• Fullscreen delivery, with the editing interface out of the way entirely.
• Speaker notes per slide, visible to you and not to the audience. Slides without notes say so, rather than showing an empty panel you distrust.
• A running timer in the presenter view, which is the difference between finishing on time and finding out afterwards that you did not.
• Keyboard navigation through the deck, so you are not hunting for controls mid-sentence.
• Escape returns you to normal editing — useful when a view mode has trapped you more than it helped.

The detail that matters on the day

Present mode is held in the URL, so a stray F5 or a browser restart in the middle of a talk puts you back in the presentation rather than in the editor. It sounds minor until it happens to you in front of forty people. The same mechanism means you can open the presenting view directly from a link, which is what you want when the laptop driving the screen is not yours.

Write the speaker notes as the sentence you would struggle to remember, not as a summary of the slide. A note repeating what the audience can already read is a note you will stop glancing at.

Preparing a deck you can present cold

1. Put one idea on each slide, and the sentence that carries it into the notes.
2. Rehearse once with the timer running — the number is almost always worse than the estimate.
3. Mark the slides you can drop if you are running long, before you have to decide live.
4. Check the deck at the resolution of the room's screen, not your laptop.
5. Open present mode from the link you will actually use on the day.

Ettex Slides covers this directly: notes per slide in the editor, a presenter view with the timer, and present mode that survives a reload. Where a deck is the output of a longer piece of work, the underlying numbers usually belong in a sheet and the narrative in a document, with the deck as the summary rather than the source.