The Mac Presenter App

Live Polls in Keynote or PowerPoint on your Mac

Getting Started

After you download and install the Mac Presenter; launch the app, login to your Poll Everywhere account, select a poll, and you'll see a screen similar to:

You may not see some of these controls unless you hover over them with your mouse and have a poll selected.

Video Tutorial

Setting up a Presentation

A little planning ahead of time will make your presentation and use of Poll Everywhere much more effective. Think about your content and what questions you'd like to ask your audience. Once you have a plan and have built your slides, you can insert, position, and format polls.

Insert a poll into a slide

In Keynote or PowerPoint, go to the slide that you want your poll to appear on, select the poll you'd like to display from the Mac Presenter poll selector, then click on one of the "Insert Slide" buttons:

When you do this, your presenter notes for that slide will be updated with some markup such as the following example:

IMPORTANT: The Mac Presenter app needs to be running for polls to appear during the presentation. Be sure its installed on the machine you're presenting from before the big show.

Resize and position a poll

What if you want to have the poll appear in the correct position and size on your slide and not just wherever it was last left on-screen? You can position your polls by drawing a solid-filled rectangle on your slide, like this:

IMPORTANT: The placeholder shape must be a solid, filled, single color rectangle that has enough contrast from whatever background it is on. Gradient or textured fills will not be recognized as placeholders by the Mac Presenter app.

During your presentation, the poll will be displayed automatically over where the rectangle was laid out on the screen, like this:

That's it! Be sure to run through your presentation to make sure the polls are appearing where you want them to. You can repeat these steps to insert other polls on other slides. Its worth noting that automatically displaying polls is limited to one per slide.

During the Presentation

While the Mac Presenter app offers a totally hands-free experience, sometimes you just want to get to a particular poll, ask a question on-the-fly, or change a few things during the presentation.

Switch between polls

You can jump directly to a poll from the poll selector or use the next or previous buttons to move quickly from one poll in the list to the next, in the order they appear on the drop-down list.

You can also use the global keyboard shortcuts to go to the next poll or the previous poll:

Poll navigation keyboard shortcuts
Next Poll	⌘⌥⇧{
Previous Poll	⌘⌥⇧}
More keyboard shortcuts...

Ask a question on-the-fly

If you want to ask a quick question or one you hadn't prepared for ahead of time, either open-ended or even multiple choice, you can quickly create one on the fly.

1. Click on the "+" button to quickly create a poll.

   

2. Type in a question you'd like to ask the audience.

   

3. Click on the "check" button to save the poll.

   

4. Boom! We convert the question into a poll on our servers, then display it on-screen so your audience can respond.

   

Toggle the visibility of the Mac Presenter app

Sometimes you just want to get the Mac Presenter app off the screen for a few moments while you discuss a topic, then bring it back up later when you'd like to discuss the poll.

Of course we have keyboard shortcuts for that if you don't feel like touching the mouse:

Hide poll keyboard shortcuts
Hide the Mac Presenter	⌘⌥⇧G
Show the Mac Presenter	⌘⌥⇧C
More keyboard shortcuts...

Tips & Troubleshooting

Keyboard Shortcuts

You can use your keyboard to quickly accomplish many tasks in Mac Presenter. These shortcuts can also be used while you are in another application to tell the Mac Presenter to do something for you.

Action	Key combination
Hide Mac Presenter ("Go away")	⌘⌥⇧G	Command-Option-Shift-G
Show Mac Presenter ("Come back")	⌘⌥⇧C	Command-Option-Shift-C
Go Next Poll (and Show Mac Presenter)	⌘⌥⇧}	Command-Option-Shift-Right Curly Brace
Go Previous Poll (and Show Mac Presenter)	⌘⌥⇧{	Command-Option-Shift-Left Curly Brace
Go Fullscreen This only works if the Mac Presenter is the active foreground application.	⌘⇧F	Command-Shift-F

Using with other applications

There is no reason you cannot bring the Mac Presenter to the forefront of any other application you might use to present with an audience. For instance, sometimes displaying a spreadsheet in Excel is ideal for conveying or presenting information. Or, perhaps the projection of a website within Safari. In these cases, where you are purely mirroring the presentation computer's display onto a projector in front of an audience, you can bring the Mac Presenter up as you please to conduct real-time polling along-side the display of almost any other information in another application used for your presentation.

As an example, here is the Mac Presenter happily running along with Microsoft Excel. This could be projected to an audience where, for example, a detailed review of laboratory results are being discussed with a large group:

Default size and position

The Mac Presenter remembers its position on-screen between and during runs of the application. If you drag the window around, quit the application, and re-open it, it will re-position itself on the screen in the same place as it was before.

As mentioned in the Setting Up Presentations section, an elegant approach to setting up for a hands-free presentation is to precisely position the Mac Presenter poll display on the screen how exactly you want it to appear and then hide the Mac Presenter application directly before you begin your live slide show. This way, the Mac Presenter application itself is not showing anywhere on the screen during the slide show unless there is a poll that is supposed to be showing on the screen for the current slide. It also means that it will be ready to display a poll on the screen in the position you set it up for ahead of time.

To do this, you'll want to be showing a poll from your list and have your slideshow running. Then drag the window around on the screen to a desriable position and also resize it appropriately:

Fullscreen Mode

You can use a chart's full screen option, just like on the web, to instruct the Mac Presenter application to fill the screen. On a given chart, you can go full screen like you are used to doing with the charts displayed in the web browser:

You can also use the Mac Presenter menu by selecting View, then Full Screen. A hotkey is also available: ⇧⌘F (Shift-Command-F)

Press the Escape key or the Full screen button again to get out of full screen mode. Note that under Mac OS X 10.7 Lion, the Full screen mode is not the Lion-style Full screen mode but rather a "fill the screen" approach so as not to disrupt [visually] your presentation while the Mac Presenter enters or exits fullscreen-style display.