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By Dan Pinnington, Director, practicePRO, LawPRO

 

 

You should make sure you are very comfortable with the basics of navigating PowerPoint when you are doing a presentation.  It looks unprofessional when someone gets up in front of an audience, gets part way through their presentation, and then has difficulties changing slides.

 

One of the best keyboard shortcuts is using the Space Bar to advance to the next slide.  Of course, you can use PageDown or the down or right cursor keys to do the same thing.  However, the Space Bar is a much larger target and it’s easier to hit if you are nervous or your hands are shaking.  This can help you get through the slides without hitting the wrong key. 

 

Another neat keyboard shortcut is pressing and releasing the Alt key, then entering the one or two digits that represent a slide number, and then hitting Enter to jump to that specific slide.  You should know the numbers of the key slides in your presentation, whether that means memorizing them or having an outline or a list in front of you.  That way, if you get to a point in your presentation where there are questions, and you need to jump back to a key slide, you are able to go directly to that slide, rather than using PageUp or PageDown through multiple slides. 

 

A “right click” anywhere on the screen in the middle of a presentation lets you access a number of features via a pop-up menu.  If you select “Go”, and then By Title, there is a listing of both slide numbers and slide titles for the entire presentation.  You can then click on a particular slide and you will jump directly to it.  There are also a number of settings for changing your pointer options.  You can change your pointer to a pen, change the colour of that pen, and then draw circles or lines on your slide to highlight certain points. 

 

Lastly, you can press “Home” to jump to the very first slide in your presentation.  If for some reason you don’t get to the end of your presentation, and you want to jump to the end, simply hitting the “End” key will jump you to the very last slide in your presentation. 

 

Review and practice using these PowerPoint keyboard shortcuts.  They will help you make better use of PowerPoint next time you use it for a presentation.