Tips for Streamlining Your PowerPoint Presentations

Microsoft PowerPoint is a very powerful application for developing presentations and slide shows. As you become more familiar with the many features provided in PowerPoint you will find yourself looking for shortcuts, especially when delivering the finished presentation. The following PowerPoint shortcuts and tips are some of my students' and my favorites. These shortcuts allow more flexibility in giving a presentation using Microsoft PowerPoint.

Keyboard shortcuts that you may find useful while giving a presentation using Microsoft PowerPoint:

Shortcut ..................... What it does

Enter/Space ............... Advances presentation one slide
Back Space ............... Returns to previous slide
[number]+Enter ...... Goes to slide [number]
B or . ........................... Toggles black screen
W or , ........................... Toggles white screen
CTRL+H ........................ Hides the pointer
CTRL+A ........................ Shows the pointer
S .................................... Stops/resumes an automatic presentation
ESC .............................. Ends a presentation

Another helpful tip is to set your PowerPoint presentation to open up directly in Slide Show view. This enables you to immediately start your presentation without having to open PowerPoint itself. This is especially useful if the computer you are using to show your PowerPoint presentation on does not have Microsoft PowerPoint installed. In this case you would need to make sure to have Microsoft PowerPoint Viewer, a free program available for download from Microsoft (www.microsoft.com) installed on the computer.

There are several ways to quickly launch a PowerPoint slide show. The following tips can help reduce the start up time for your presentation by allowing you to open your presentation directly in slide show view.

1. You can save it as a PowerPoint slide show file, and when you double-click it, it opens right up in slide show view.
To save your presentation as a slide show file:
a. Open the presentation you want to save as a slide show.
b. On the File menu, click Save As.
c. In the Save as type list, click PowerPoint Show. Your slide show file will be saved with a .pps file extension.
d. When you open this file from your desktop, it will automatically start your presentation in slide show view. When you're done, PowerPoint automatically closes and you return to the desktop.

2. In Microsoft Windows Explorer, simply right-click any PowerPoint presentation and then click Show to start the show.

3. Or you can turn a PowerPoint presentation into a slide show file by simply renaming the file extension from .ppt to .pps in Windows Explorer.
Now you can launch it in one click!