The Whiteboard in PowerPoint

By David Field

I work with a bunch of engineers who think fast. In meetings about the product they will sometimes leap up and draw a diagram on the whiteboard with markers. That’s good for small conference rooms that hold about thirty people, but in larger settings either there’s no whiteboard or the audience is too far away to see the detail.

That can be a problem when you’re making a presentation. You may be asked, “How do you configure that?” or “Why didn’t you use [a specific component]?” The answer to this means you have to draw a diagram or try to describe things in words alone.

PowerPoint has a rudimentary whiteboard. If you press the W key in the middle of a presentation you’ll get a white screen. Choose a pen color and draw on the screen using the mouse. Press the W key again and you’ll return to where you were in the presentation.

Mice are very handy for choosing items on menus and clicking on icons, but as someone said, “Making artwork with a mouse is like drawing with a bar of soap.” It’s almost impossible to write recognizable text. You can only remove the entire drawing, not just a line in the wrong place. There is a way around this, which I’ll come to in a moment.

But if you want to draw with a mouse, here’s how to do it. When the slide show is running, press the W key. Then click on the right mouse button. On the pop-up menu, choose Pointer Options. On the menu that opens up from Pointer Options, choose either Pen (if you want to draw in black) or Pen color (if you want to draw in one of the nine colors PowerPoint offers). After you choose, the menu vanishes and the cursor is a pen. You can now draw by pressing the left mouse button.

One very useful feature is drawing straight lines. Hold down the Shift key and move the mouse, and the lines come out straight. You can also save completed drawings by pressing the PrtScn key and pasting the results into the Paint program. Even better is to use a commercially available screen capture program.

However, we’re still faced with the problem of text. Diagrams need to be clearly labeled. Many people like to write down the aims of a training class at the beginning of the session and return to it at the end of the day. They use a flip chart, but it would be nice to be able to enter the goals into PowerPoint and come back to them later.

Luckily there’s a device that lets you write with something that’s pen-shaped. It’s called a Graphics Tablet and costs under a hundred dollars. It consists of a flat piece of plastic that you draw on and a “pen” which lets you draw in any program that lets you draw with the mouse.

In fact the pen can take the place of the mouse. You can press on the drawing surface and let go one or twice to send a single or double click. Moving the pen over the drawing surface sends the mouse cursor around the screen.

I don’t use the pen as a mouse. When I run my computer, either the pen or the original mouse will work, and as I don’t use the pen in drawing programs I find that I’m faster with mouse — although I’m sure that using the pen more would speed up my work.

Graphics tablets come in many sizes. Some have very large drawing areas but the low-end models have a four by five inch area. The good news is that you don’t need a large drawing area. My Wacom Graphire has a four-by-five-inch drawing area and at that size, people normally write text at the best size for a presentation screen.

There are buttons on the pen to change the action to right mouse buttons, and the top end of the pen is an eraser to remove any lines you point to. Unlike some older models, the pen itself doesn’t need a battery — you connect the drawing surface to the power supply and the USB lead to the computer.

Drawing is surprisingly easy to pick up. People draw and write successfully by looking at the screen. Tell people to use capital letters, because like those credit card signing machines in some stores, it’s possible to write at an angle when using cursive text.

Try a graphics tablet. In a few weeks you’ll be wondering how you ever did without it.

Learn more about David Field in our Contributor's section.