Using A Shortcut To Get Your Mac Ready For a Presentation

There are many things you may need to remember to do before starting an online or in-person presentation on your Mac. But creating your own custom Shortcut, you can avoid forgetting to do something like quit apps, set the volume, turn on a Focus mode and change your wallpaper. You can also have it launch your presentation or website automatically.

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Video Transcript: Hi, this is Gary with MacMost.com. Let me show you how you can create a shortcut to help you prepare for presentations. 
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Now if you use your Mac for presentations, whether they are in person or online, then there is probably some steps that you take just before you start presenting. You can have the Shortcuts App do a lot of these steps for you automatically. The great thing about that is that you won't forget to do them. You just run the Shortcut and it will take all the steps for you. So I'm going to show you a variety of different things that you can put into a shortcut like this and you can pick and choose which ones you need. 
Let's create the shortcut and then let's call this Prepare for Presentations. So the first thing you probably want to do is you want to go into a certain Focus Mode. Focus modes are really made for things like this where you can turn Notifications Off and such. So in System Preferences under Notifications & Focus and then Focus I've created a presentation mode. You can create one too and you can say, Allow Notification from Certain People, from certain apps if you like. In Options there's more here that you can allow. Basically this is a Do Not Disturb mode but especially for presenting. So this is the Do Not Disturb mode that we want. We'll search for Focus. We'll set Focus and we'll turn it to Presenting Mode. We'll say On until Turned Off. Later we'll look at how to actually have it turned Off automatically. 
Now one of the things you may need to do when you're doing a presentation is to Quit Apps that you're not using in that presentation. So search for Quit and you've got Quit App. But instead of Quit App click on there and change to All Apps. Now All Apps quit except the ones you don't want to. So, for instance, if you know that you probably present over some app like this. You can add that to the list. You may want to add whatever you're presenting with to the list. Maybe you're showing some web stuff so you don't necessarily want to quit Safari and you add all that. So now you should just have those three apps running. Except that what if they aren't already running. So, you want to search for Open and then choose Open App and then do that for every app that you need open. So we'll add this one here. We'll do another one. You don't have to use these, of course. It's whatever it is that you use when you do a presentation or a specific presentation you're planning for right now. 
Now you may want to have some of those apps Open but Hidden when you start. After all if it is a online meeting or something you don't need whatever apps you're presenting with right now. So you can choose Hide and then there's Hide Out. So we can have, let's say, Keynote hidden, so it is launched but hidden and then the same thing maybe with Safari. Then maybe Safari you want it to actually go to a specific page. So let's search for something like URL and we see there's Open URL's. That's what we want. There's actually Show Webpage. But Show Webpage does something different. It shows a webpage in a little window. We want this to actually Open the URL in Safari. So you can customize this to have Safari open up a new tab or window or the normal thing for however you have Safari set to go to this page. You may also want to have Safari go to the Full Screen size if it is not already there just to make sure. You can do something like that with a Find Windows and then you have to do something to tell it to find the windows that meet a certain criteria. So Add Filter. You can do Title and match the title of this page. But more likely you want to do something like App Name. Then we can do Resize and now it's going to take the output of this and it's going to resize the window to fit the screen. So it fills the screen. Remember Safari is actually Hidden so let's move the Hidden down to the bottom here so it will do all of that and then hide Safari. So it is ready to go but hidden. 
Likewise with Keynote you can actually have Keynote Open a presentation to get ready. So you can have it open like this and add it to the bottom here so Keynote is launched there. It doesn't really need to be because this would launch it if it is not. Now you can click there to select a presentation. Or I could have selected Play Presentation in Show mode and that will actually open up the presentation and play it so it is really ready to go. 
Now there are other things that you may want to set about your whole Mac. Like, for instance, Volume. Maybe you set the volume really high to listen to music but you want to make sure you set it back down to 50% or whatever before the presentation starts. Or maybe you're in the habit of setting it really low or muting it and you want to make sure it is set to 50% so you don't have to fiddle with the volume when the meeting starts. So you can set that there. You can do the same thing with Brightness. If you ever adjust your screen brightness but want to make sure it gets to something before you start your presentation. Maybe it is a dark room you are presenting in and you want it to go down when you start the presentation. Another thing you may want to set is Wallpaper. You can set the Wallpaper for your Mac, the Desktop background, to a specific image. So you need to actually get a file. So let's do File and let's do, I'll just drag it up above it, and I can select the image I want to use and have it set the Wallpaper to that image by selecting the Magic Variable and then using the results of this file there. So I can be using a special graphic or just a solid color image or something like that. Just to make sure that whatever whimsical background I'm using normally isn't there when I switch my laptop on in front of a room full of people or start to share my screen and maybe switch to finder and they all see it.
Now you can also have some music playing. Sometimes you start your presentation. It's on the first slide. You can see here it is set to Open the Presentation in Show Mode so everything is going great except it is silent. It's just on that first slide. It may be 5, 10, 30 minutes as people enter the room and all of that and you would like to have some music playing. You can have music playing. Let's search for this, Play Music, and you can select music from your Music Library. It will start playing. You can also then Hide the Music App after that so it will actually start playing music but Hide the app so it's not visible. That really sets the environment and does all sorts of things. 
But a couple more things I want to show you. First, you have the Do Not Disturb or Focus Mode of presenting turned on at the beginning. It's really common then to forget that you did that. Then the rest of the day you're not getting Notifications even after the meeting is over. So instead of Until Turned Off you can set it to a specific time. So if you know the meeting is at 2 p.m. you can have this turned Off at 4 p.m. But if it is something you're going to use all the time you might not be able to predict when the meeting starts and when you should have this turned Off. You could go here and just say When I Leave and then it detects when you change locations. But that might not work if you're just presenting from your office. So what you can do is you can go to Date. You can get the Date and I'll stick it right up here at the top. Then you go to Adjust Date. I'm going to stick that right below. So this will get the current date. Then I'm going to add, let's say, 90 minutes to it. I'm going to Control Click, two-finger click on a trackpad or right click on a mouse, select Magic Variable, Adjust the Date. So it's going to get the date or more accurately the time 90 minutes from now and that's when it is going to turn Off this Focus mode.
Another thing you may want is some sort of reminder of the things you need to do that are outside of your Mac's control. You can create a piece of text, like this. I'll add this to the bottom. You can put whatever you want here. So you can put something like this. Have a little list of reminders like that. Then you can use Quick Look and then it will show that text in Quick Look. So you get this little box that appears after everything else is done that just is there on the screen and you dismiss it. But it's a good way to just remember these things. 
Now let's just set this up in a way that we can use it really easily. Go to the Settings here and then just select Pin in Menu Bar. Now it appears here and you could run this whenever you want. So I hope this gives you some ideas of how to build a shortcut to make it easier to start either an online or in person presentation on your Mac. 
Thanks for watching.

Comments: 5 Responses to “Using A Shortcut To Get Your Mac Ready For a Presentation”

Jasper

8 months ago

Thanks, This looks useful—I’ll give it a go.

Could also use a Run Shell Script to hide desktop clutter and put it back afterwards, with the +90 minutes trick that you turn off Focus with.

7 months ago

hello Gary,

I tried this and it didn't work. It set the Notification & open Zoom and stopped there. So I removed the other apps to see if it would go further and still didn't work.

Gary Rosenzweig

JL: I'm showing a lot of different thing you can use in this video. What, exactly, didn't work?

Claudio Silvaggi

5 months ago

Hey brother you make it look so easy... Awesome ... I've just recently started using shortcuts thanks to you... Quick question... Searched everywhere for the answer, I created a shortcut Called "Birth Data" so when I tell Siri "Birth Data" it just simply types it out..

1. Date of Birth
2. Time of Birth
3. City Born

When I'm in an email or FB for example, I launch the "Birth Data" by voice she says done...
But nothing happens..
Hope you can help
Cheers
Claudio...

Claudio: I don't really understand what your Shortcut does. Where does the data come from? You'll have to debug it to figure out why it isn't working in some situations. Try simplifying it to test out other Shortcuts in similar situations.

Using A Shortcut To Get Your Mac Ready For a Presentation

Comments: 5 Responses to “Using A Shortcut To Get Your Mac Ready For a Presentation”

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