Show Control from the Tech Table: How AV Crews Run Slides

Every touring show, conference and church service has a tech table: a desk with a mixer, a switcher, a laptop or two, and someone whose job is to make the room work. Show control is what happens at that desk. Slides are usually the exception. They live on a laptop by the podium, run by whoever the speaker handed a clicker to, and nobody at the table has eyes on them until they freeze mid-sentence.

This post is about closing that gap: bringing slide advance into the same control surface as your lighting cues, camera switches and audio, so one operator (or the speaker themselves) drives everything from one place.

What show control actually covers

"Show control" is a loose industry term for the systems that trigger and sequence everything an audience sees and hears: lighting cues, video switches, audio playback, camera presets, and yes, slide decks. Some of it runs on dedicated protocols like MIDI Show Control or OSC. Some of it is a person pressing a button at the right moment.

The common thread is a single point of truth for "what happens next." A good show runs on cues, not guesswork. The weak point in most events is that slides sit outside that system entirely, tethered to whatever software the speaker's laptop happens to be running.

Why slides usually sit outside the system

Three reasons show up again and again:

That gap is exactly why slide freezes and stuck decks are the most common visible failure at live events: it is the one cue nobody in the booth can trigger directly.

Bring slide advance to the desk with Cliqer

Cliqer's desktop app runs on the machine driving the slides (PowerPoint, Keynote, Google Slides, Prezi, LibreOffice Impress or a custom web deck) and opens a room that any browser can join as a presenter or backup operator, with no install and no account needed on that side. Concretely, to move slide control to the tech table:

Clicker, laptop bridge or Cliqer: what each path actually gets you

Putting it on the same surface as everything else

Once slide advance lives in a browser tab instead of a proprietary dongle, it behaves like any other cue source. A Stream Deck plugged into the desk can hold Next, Previous, a timer display and a caller cut-to-black on the same panel as your other show buttons. Bitfocus Companion goes further: slide advance, timer control and live feedback sit alongside lighting and video triggers in the same button-control software most touring and church crews already run.

That matters more than it sounds. It means the person running lights doesn't need to learn a second tool, and the person covering a break doesn't need a handoff meeting to find "the slide clicker."

Redundancy the crew can actually rely on

A dropped slide advance mid-keynote is the kind of failure an audience notices immediately, so backup matters. Multi-host setup lets a second machine join the same room; if the primary host disconnects, the secondary is promoted automatically and presenters notice nothing. That is a very different failure mode from "the one laptop running the deck just froze and nobody has a plan B."

For teams running the same show across multiple venues, branded presenter rooms also mean the room link and QR code look like part of your production, not a third-party tool bolted on.

FAQ

Get slides off the side laptop

If your crew is still handing a dongle to the speaker and hoping for the best, it is worth trying the alternative for one show. Download Cliqer free and run your next rehearsal with slide control on the desk instead of the podium. Add it to your own pre-show checklist, and for teams running multiple rooms or venues, compare Pro, Ultra and Studio plans, or read how rental and staging companies are making the same move.