When we talk about a program to make presentations in public, surely the first that comes to mind is PowerPoint. The popular Microsoft application is a benchmark and tremendously used in all areas, be it domestic, student or professional. Whether you are new or if you have been using the application for some time, you may not know some functions that the application has and that we may not know about.
PowerPoint is an application that is available within the Office or Microsoft 365 office suite. It is a powerful tool for making presentations, but one that can often surprise us, since some of its most useful functions may be unknown or simply hidden.
That is why today we are going to see some easy tricks that we may not know and that will help us to work more productively, obtaining better results in our presentations.
Sort items in a list with a keyboard shortcut
When writing text in PowerPoint, it is usual to do it in bullet format when we want to make a list of elements one below the other. At the moment that we want to move one of those names in the list up or down, we will not be able to do it in a comfortable way. Possibly, we would choose to cut and paste elsewhere, but there is an easier way to arrange these items.
To do this, we are going to select one of the list items to be able to interact with it by dragging the mouse pointer to have it selected or use the key combination “Shift + Home” or “Shift + End”. Once the item is selected we use the shortcut “Shift + Alt + Up / Down Arrow” to move the item up or down in the list. In this more comfortable way we can keep all the elements of a list always organized.
Use the Selection Panel to control object names and layers
An interesting element that we may not know about is the Selection Panel. From it we can name all the elements that we have on the screen and control the order of each layer . We can also use it to hide elements that are shown on the screen and that bother us with the work we are currently doing.
We can activate it from the “Start” tab. In the “Edition” section we find the option to “Select” and “Selection panel”. Pressing will open a panel that appears on the right side of the screen, which lists all the types of objects that appear on the slide . From here we can edit the names of the objects, order them, hide or show them.
Review the content while PowerPoint reads the presentation to us
While we are reviewing a list in our presentation we can use PowerPoint’s “Read Aloud” option to take care of reading its content so that we can make sure it is spelled correctly. This is something that we can do quite quickly.
To do this we click on File, then on “Options and finally on Customize Ribbon. At the top we select All Commands. Now in the list we look for the ” Read “ option and click on the” Add “button within a Custom group Now we only have to point out all the elements of a page that we want PowerPoint to read aloud to us and click on their corresponding button in the toolbox.
