6 Power Point Shortcuts To Present Better

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Engage your audience better in your next presentation, by learning these 6 Power Point shortcuts to present your slides. Learn when to use these shortcut keys in your presentation. These features of PowerPoint can take your presentation delivery to the next level.

Leverage value of PowerPoint Slideshow mode:

Power Point Shortcuts Keys Image The only 2 features that most presenters use while giving their presentation is ‘Enter’ to go to next slide or ‘Page up’ to go to previous page. There are many more useful features in PowerPoint that are relatively unknown to most presenters.
In this article, we will explore some of those useful Power Point shortcuts when you are in the slideshow mode.

1. Use ‘B’ key to shift the audience attention to you:

When you want the attention of your audience on you instead of on your slide, press ‘B’ on your keyboard. The slide blanks out and your audience attention shifts to you.

When to use this shortcut?

Before you present a complex idea, it is always helpful to prime your audience on the concept, so they know what to expect. Use B to blank the screen. Take them through the concept verbally and press ‘Enter’ to show the slides
Use ‘B’ while answering your audience questions. This conveys the level of importance you give to your audience’s views and concerns.

2. Use ‘W’ key to get blank white screen:

Pressing W on your keyboard gives a blank white screen.

When to use this shortcut key?

These days most conference rooms use the whiteboard to project slides as well. We use ‘W’ to light up the screen while writing on the board. This makes the writing clearly visible for everyone. This is especially helpful when we can’t use charts due to dim lights in the conference rooms.
We also use this method to display and demonstrate objects of a small size. When we illuminate the object by pressing W, the light is sufficient to help everyone look at the object clearly.

More Power Point shortcuts below…

3. Use ‘Ctrl + S’ shortcut for All slides dialog:

PowerPoint Shortcuts All Slides Image When you press Ctrl + S, you get the ‘All slides dialog’ to access any slide you want without having to press Esc and exit the slideshow. Since the slide titles are displayed for easy reference, you can locate your slides quickly and accurately. If you know the exact number of a slide you want to go to, enter the slide number and press enter. For example, if you want to go to 17th slide. Press 1 followed by 7 and Enter.

When to use this shortcut?

If in the middle of your sales presentation if your prospect wants to know the next steps, you use ‘Ctrl+S’ to jump directly to the ‘Next steps’ slide instead of taking your audience through the entire set of slides.
If your audience wants to refer to the information you shared a few slides back, you use ‘All slides dialog’ to locate the specific slide without having to scroll through all your previous slides.

4. Use ‘H’ to access next slide if hidden:

By pressing ‘H’ on your keyboard, you can access the Hidden slides.

When to use this shortcut?

You can use this feature to customize your presentation as per the understanding level of your audience. For example, we create a slide that shows additional worked example of a calculation and keep it hidden. We show it by pressing H only if we find that the audience needs more explanation.

5. Use ‘Ctrl+P’ shortcut to draw on the screen:

PowerPoint Pen Highlighter Image When you press ‘Ctrl+P’ the pointer becomes a pen in slideshow mode. You can draw any shape you want to highlight an area or underline a sentence etc.

When to use these Power Point Shortcuts?

We use this quite extensively for conducting quick audience polls during the presentation.
We also use this to show the relationship of one object to another. The spontaneity of drawing on screen gives life to boring presentations.

Note about the PowerPoint pen and highlighter:

Your annotations remain on the slide even when you move to next slides. This helps you to refer back to your annotations without losing them. If you want to save these annotations in your presentations, you can do so when you exit the slideshow view.

A dialog box will prompt you with – “Do you want to keep your ink annotations?” Select ‘Keep’ or ‘Discard’ as per your preference.

If you want to erase all the annotations on the slide, press E. To erase only a few annotations on the slide, press ‘Ctrl+E’. This will change the pointer to eraser.

By using right click in slideshow mode you can access dialog to change your pointer to Ballpoint pen, Felt tip pen or Highlighter as follows. You can even choose the color of your pen:

PowePoint Key for Pen Image Related: See 5 ideas to highlight text in your presentation

6. Use ‘Ctrl+T’ to view Task bar:

When you press ‘Ctrl+T’ a task bar will appear in the bottom of the screen. This will help you access the other files that are open on your computer.

When to use this feature?

If you have your back up excel sheet open, you can access it quickly by using ‘Ctrl+T’ in slideshow mode itself. Once you are through using excel sheet, press F5 and you are back to the slideshow.
Use these Power Point shortcuts to access heavy video files quickly, instead of embedding them in your PowerPoint file.