PowerPoint Tricks You May Not Have Heard About

Microsoft PowerPoint is so pervasive, yet discovering little tricks to assist your presentation are out there.  Here is a list of the ones I find most useful or have great potential to be put to use by speakers.

• Many people fidget to put the program into slide-show mode.  There are four ways to do so: the icon on the bottom left corner of the slide window, Slide Show under the View drop-down menu, and View Show under Slide Show menu, or F5 on Windows.
• Typing the escape key in slide-show mode, ends the slow, and returns you to the PowerPoint program.
• If you do not use a remote clicker to advance the slides, use the spacebar.  It is the biggest and most unique key.  The back-arrow is the most obvious key to go backward easily.  The mouse buttons are less intuitive: to advance the presentation, click on the left mouse button; to go backward, click on the right mouse button.
• Print out a list of the slides and their order number.  If you need to jump quickly to another slide in your presentation without exiting slide-show mode or clicking furiously through the talk, type the number and then hit the Enter or Return key.
• Presenter’s Tools, a view showing the previous, current, and next slide, a timer, and the speaker notes can be accessed through pressing the shift button and then starting in slide-show mode.
• Presenter’s tools include a pencil tool to draw on the slides (Control-P in Windows or Command-P on a Mac).  Because this tool is underutilized by speakers, its very use would be distinctive in your talk.  The moment that everyone starts doing it, however, it might just become passé.  The E key will erase your drawings.
• Typing the W key whites the screen.  Then, you can use the pencil tool to draw on it.
• Typing the B key will blank the screen.  This can be useful for getting the audience to focus back on you, especially if you are on a tangent and do not want them looking at a different slide.
• The arrow pointer on the screen can be an effective tool for pointing if you do not have a laser pointer.  The arrow and slight movements in the mouse, however, can distract the audience from your message.  Typing Ctrl-H in slide-show mode will make it go away, and the A key will bring it back.