Improve Your Presentation Skills by Rehearsing with PowerPoint Presenter Coach

Did you know that PowerPoint can help you improve your presentation skills? 💡 If you rehearse with the PowerPoint Presenter Coach, you can get real-time feedback on things like your pace and language. If that’s too distracting (it is for me), you can choose to hide the real-time feedback and only view the detailed report at the end of your rehearsal.

The report shows you details about the total time spent, your pace and pitch over time, whether or not you are simply reading from your slides, as well as actionable feedback on your language. The feedback includes whether you are using too many filler words (like umm, actually, or you know), whether you are using too many repetitive words with alternatives you can use instead, whether you are using any words that can be offensive, and specific sentences that you can refine.

The PowerPoint Presenter Coach works on Windows, macOS, iOS, Android, and in PowerPoint online 🥳 However, it currently only understands English. Let’s hope it will learn new languages soon!

Rehearsing with PowerPoint Presenter Coach

In Windows (and macOS?), choose Rehearse with Coach from the ribbon:

(If you don’t see this option on the ribbon, you may have to change your Office user interface to English.)

This will start your slide show, and you can choose to show real-time feedback:

When you end your slide show, you will see the full report:

In PowerPoint Online

In PowerPoint Online, you can also choose to get feedback on your body language:

After you give PowerPoint online access to your camera, you will get additional real-time feedback on things like your placement and pronunciation:

I’m assuming that new features will keep being added to PowerPoint online first, and then later built into the desktop apps. If you want the most out of your final rehearsals, you may want to switch to PowerPoint online 😊

How has the PowerPoint Presenter Coach helped me?

Rehearsing has always been difficult for me because… it’s not real? I get distracted very easily, I tend to get hung up on small things, and I often start over like… at least seventeen times. At least. It has been frustrating to spend that much time rehearsing and still not get accurate timings, and to feel like I’m just going blah bluh bleh ARGH!

So! When I sat down to rehearse my Data Saturday Oslo keynote, I finally decided to try the PowerPoint Presenter Coach.

Mind. Blown. 🤯

Like I wrote on Twitter that day, just knowing that “someone” was listening made a big difference. It felt more real when I knew that I would get direct, honest feedback afterwards. (And, uh, PowerPoint did in fact notice and point out the one swear word I used 👀😅) For the first time ever, I was able to sit alone in front of a screen and rehearse as if I was presenting for a real audience.

I will definitely keep using the PowerPoint Presenter Coach, and I hope you will try it as well. It’s a great way to improve your presentation skills 🤓

About the Author

Cathrine Wilhelmsen is a Microsoft Data Platform MVP, international speaker, author, blogger, organizer, and chronic volunteer. She loves data and coding, as well as teaching and sharing knowledge - oh, and sci-fi, gaming, coffee and chocolate 🤓