I learned this from investigating an e-mail forward I received during the Christmas holidays, but it’s a useful tip that others might like to hear.

When you’re giving a presentation, the last thing you need is more work, and I have seen numerous presenters struggle with the foreign laptop they’re on or try to get something up and running. Having your slides all ready to go on a thumb drive helps to make things go a little more smoothly and this tip will make your presentation automatically open up in slideshow mode.

It’s quite simple.

Let’s say your file is called presentation.ppt. To make it open in slideshow mode, you just have to change a single letter in the filename. Change the extension to pps instead of ppt (presentation.pps). When you open the file it will be in slideshow mode and you can begin talking, off to a smooth start in your presentation.