What is the pen tool in a presentation?

Pointing that everyone can see

A presenter has always needed a way to say look here, and the tools have followed the room. A hand works at a whiteboard, a laser pointer works in a lecture theatre, and neither works for the person watching on a laptop at home. Presentation software answers with marks drawn by the presenter on the slide as it is shown. PowerPoint offers a pen and a highlighter during a slideshow, and on Windows the mouse becomes a laser pointer while the Ctrl key is held down, red by default with green and blue available. Microsoft Teams adds its own laser pointer and pen for PowerPoint slides shared in a meeting, precisely because a remote audience cannot see the room.

Temporary marks and permanent marks

The most useful distinction between annotation tools is not colour or thickness but how long a mark lasts. A mark that fades on its own belongs to a sentence: you circle the figure as you name it, and by the time you have moved to the next point the circle has gone and the slide is clean again, with nothing to tidy. A mark that stays belongs to an argument: a ring around the recommended option, or a line joining a cause to its effect, that you will point back to over the next minute. A pointer that leaves no mark at all belongs to the moment. Choosing the tool by how long the mark should live prevents the most common result of live drawing, a slide buried under scribbles.

When annotation earns its place

Annotation helps most on slides that hold more than a single point: a table of figures, a chart with several series, a process diagram, a map, a screenshot of software. On those slides the audience does not know where to look, and a quick circle answers that faster than any sentence. It helps in question time, when someone asks about the third bar and you can mark it rather than describe it. It is almost essential on video calls and in recorded sessions, where there is no other way to point. On a simple slide with one large number it adds nothing, because the slide has already done the pointing. Teachers and trainers use the same idea in a different way, showing a slide with only the question on it and working the answer through with the pen, so the class watches the reasoning rather than reading a finished solution.

Common mistakes

The first mistake is handwriting with a mouse. Words drawn with a mouse are illegible, so stick to circles, underlines, ticks and arrows unless you have a stylus or touch screen. The second is drawing too much, until the marks compete with the content. The third is choosing a colour that disappears, such as a red pen on a slide full of red bars, or a dark stroke on a dark background. The fourth is turning your back to the audience to draw while still talking, so both the drawing and the sentence suffer. The fifth is using annotation to rescue a slide that is too dense to read, when the better fix is splitting it into two slides before the talk.

The pen tools in the slide builder's present mode

Present mode carries three drawing tools and a clear button. The Highlighter draws a stroke that fades after about two seconds, the Pen draws one that stays until cleared, and the Spotlight shows a ring to draw attention to one spot without leaving a mark. Each comes in five colours, red, yellow, green, blue and black, and Clear removes all drawings on the current slide at once. The pen tools are blocked on the Free plan. They work alongside the rest of present mode, so the notes can sit in their own pop out window on your screen while you mark up the slides on the shared one. Pick one colour that contrasts with the deck's theme and keep it for the whole talk, so the audience learns what a mark means.

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