As a business professional, you’ve probably dabbled in the art of PowerPoint. And if you host webinars regularly, I’m sure you’ve picked up a few tricks to spice up your presentations and make them more engaging too. Whether you’re a PowerPoint newbie or an emerging pro, here are 10 cool PowerPoint tips and tricks you’ll want handy for your next presentation.
- Don’t settle for the basic, built-in PowerPoint templates
PowerPoint templates make your lives easier. Templates mean you don’t have to design everything from scratch. Just select your layout, add your content, make a few edits here and there, and you’re done.
Millions of people have used these templates in their presentations. If you don’t want your presentation to look like a copy-paste, me-too version, stay away from the built-in templates. The good news is there are other free and premium templates out there beyond the ones Microsoft provides.
- Use Format Painter to save time
Format Painter does one thing and one thing only: it saves you time. Tons of it, in fact. Here’s where you find this nifty time-saver on your PowerPoint ribbon. If you’ve ever tried copy and pasting one element’s format to many other elements on the same slide, or on 100 other slides, you know how time-consuming the process is.
Without Format Painter, formatting elements goes something like this:
- Format one element and remember all the different settings.
- Format the second element and then try to remember all the settings from the first element.
- Look at the clock and realize you’ve wasted 10 minutes.
With Format Painter, however, all you do is:
- Click the first element.
- Hit Format Painter.
- Click the second element.
That’s it! If you want to copy the first element’s format and paste into more than one element, just double-click the Format Painter and click each element you want to format one by one. When you’ve formatted all the elements, hit ESC on your keyboard. It’s that easy.
- Animate a flowchart to make it come alive
Flowcharts are a great way to display complex information. However, you may not want to show an entire flowchart at once. Instead, you want each point to appear at the right time so you can discuss each point verbally. Here’s how you animate a flow chart in PowerPoint:
- Click the first element, point, or process in your flowchart. Then select an animation from the Animations tab.
- Define each element’s animation and timing settings.
- You can also open the Animations Pane to view and adjust your animation settings.
- Repeat steps 1 and 2 for all elements in your flowchart. Make sure you preview the whole flowchart animation and edit as necessary.
- The new Zoom feature for Office 365 subscribers
If you’ve got an active Office 365 subscription, and you’ve downloaded the latest version of PowerPoint, you have the Zoom option on the Insert tab. As you can see in the screenshot below, there are three Zoom options:
- Summary Zoom
- Section Zoom
- Slide Zoom
The Zoom feature is great when you want to jump from one section or slide to another. Let’s say you want to go from Slide 10 to Slide 55. In a regular PowerPoint presentation, you’d have to go through slides 11 to 54. But with Zoom, you can instantly go from slide 10 to 55 before your audience has a chance to lose interest. Of course, you’d have to plan ahead and know which slide you want to skip.
The Summary Zoom feature creates a summary slide which is similar to a ‘table of contents’ for your slides. You can insert this summary slide anywhere you want, it doesn’t have to be the first slide in your presentation.
The Section Zoom feature allows you to jump from one section to another, while the Slide Zoom feature allows you to jump to any slide in your presentation.