Welcome to the home of Presentation Control Panel, an add-in for Microsoft’s PowerPoint that is designed to make it easier to present on-screen and in-print presentations.

When preparing a presentation, you may want to provide your audience with handouts containing the slides you’re about to show them.  The problem is that if your slides include animation effects, they can become extremely cluttered and difficult to read when printed.

The answer is simple… produce an on-screen version and an in-print version which will be used when printing handouts.  If your presentation is small, this is fairly straightforward, but what if you’re producing a 2 day training course with hundreds of slides for example?  What if one particular part of your show requires 30 or so slides to achieve the desired result and the in-print version only requires 5?  Flipping the visibility can be time consuming and extremely tedious and what happens if you miss a few?

This is the exact situation I found myself in.  I was producing a training course for my employers and I had quite a few slides that looked awful when printed, so I created some in-print versions.  But as the presentation grew, flipping between on-screen and in-print versions became a problem.  Add to this the fact that I needed to be able to include customer specific content that I could guarantee wouldn’t be shown when the same presentation was used to train someone else, and it became clear I had a need for some software assistance and so, Presentation Control Panel (or PCP for short) was born.