I’ve been part of the team in the “V” part of the AV at church for several years. Last spring I was asked to put together the visuals for the Men’s Southport Great Banquet, so I did and got a lot of favorable comments. I was asked to do the visuals for both men’s and women’s this fall and got some nice comments, but the best one was from a fellow AV guy from another church. We were talking about tools and he asked me what I used, which is MS Powerpoint. He said that he had even more respect for my stuff because it was amazing and even more amazing because it was Powerpoint. I do a lot with transitions and photos, but the secret to running services using Powerpoint is in phrasing the words on the slides from a singer’s perspective, and knowing when to advance the slides. I advance 3 words before the end of a phrase so the singers know what is coming up next, which has allowed us to eliminate the music stands from the platform and keep the singers eyes up.
The only bad thing about Powerpoint is there is no room for improvisation, at least the way the hardware is set up at church. I’m looking to show the other team members how to do dual monitors so that you can run in presenter view mode. I think once they got past the “different” part they would really appreciate the flexibility of using presenter view.