Preview Options in Adobe Presenter

When you work on a presentation using Adobe Presenter within PowerPoint, then you really cannot preview using PowerPoint's Slide Show view. And that's because Adobe Presenter's output options are completely different than PowerPoint's.

Let us imagine that you added narrations or synced your audio with animation on PowerPoint slides using Presenter. Now to preview, you will need to use Adobe Presenter's own Preview options. Having said so, these Preview options essentially render output on the fly and show it to you. If you are working on a large file, such previews can take awfully long to render. Thankfully, Presenter lets you preview just a single slide, or even a few slides quickly. Do remember though that it is a good idea to save your file before previewing. Also previewing individual slides as you work will save your time, and you can find any minor or major errors, and correct them soon.

Let us now explore the various Preview options that Adobe Presenter provides:

Assuming you are working on your presentation, save it again. Then access the Adobe Presenter tab of the Ribbon, and click the down-arrow of Preview button, highlighted in red within Figure 1. This brings up a drop-down menu (see Figure 1 again).


Figure 1: Preview button

All the options within the Preview drop-down menu are explained below, as marked in Figure 1, above:

1. Preview Presentation: Previews the entire presentation (all slides).
   
   
2. Preview Current Slide: Previews only the currently selected slide in the presentation.
   
   
3. Preview from Current Slide: Creates a preview starting from the currently selected slide until the last slide.
   
   
4. Preview Next 5 Slides: Previews the next five slides starting from the currently selected slide.
   
   You can change the value, 5 to any other required value in the application's settings. To do so, select the Adobe Presenter tab. Then within the Tools group, click the Settings button, as shown highlighted in red within Figure 2.
   
   
   Figure 2: Settings button
   
   This will open the Settings dialog box, as shown in Figure 3. Here select the Preview option (highlighted in red within Figure 3) in the sidebar. This shows the relevant options on the right side of the Settings dialog box. Notice the number 5 within the Preview Next box, as shown highlighted in blue within Figure 3 -- you can change this number to something other than 5.
   
   
   Figure 3: Settings dialog box
   
   
5. Preview HTML: This option will create a preview in HTML (essentially this creates HTML5 output, and is a new option introduced within Adobe Presenter 10). When a presentation is previewed, it appears within your default web browser with all of the functionality. For example, the audio will work exactly the way it would have using the other Preview options. The presentation appears with all of the Theme settings and colors you have chosen.

For all Preview options, you will see a Preview window, as shown in Figure 4. Here Adobe Presenter gathers all the information required to create a preview. This process may take a while depending upon the complexity of your presentation, or even the number of slides you are previewing.


Figure 4: Adobe Presenter - Preview window

Once done, you can preview the presentation within the Adobe Presenter player, as shown in Figure 5. Click the OK button to close this window


Figure 5: Preview the presentation