Microsoft PowerPoint Shortcuts That You Didn’t Know

Updated: March 17, 2023| Published: June 12, 2018| SlideUpLift Blog
Microsoft PowerPoint Shortcuts That You Didn’t Know

PowerPoint is nothing short of a phenomenal tool when it comes to building business presentations. If you have been a regular PowerPoint user, you would already know that it has some amazing features. Would it surprise you if we tell you that certain powerpoint shortcuts will boost your productivity? Let’s discover those powerpoint shortcut keys!

Important PowerPoint Shortcuts

PowerPoint Shortcut: How To Create Your Own Shapes

We often require different shapes during our business presentations. And SmartArt in PowerPoint provides wonderful art to be added to your slides. It might so happen that you want to use one part of that art and not everything in it, but you don’t know how to get rid of unwanted elements.

Here’s we tell you ppt shortcuts to do it:

  • Just right-click and choose ungroup option.
  • You can choose to delete unwanted elements from the art.
  • You can then go to the design tab and convert it to the shape.

Hallelujah, it’s done!

shortcut for ppt

Watch this stepwise video tutorial to get a detailed idea about this powerpoint shortcut

 

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PowerPoint Shortcut: How To Enter Dummy Content

This happens too often while preparing a business PowerPoint presentation that you reserve a slide for content to be added later or to show space for the text. A quick shortcut to add as much dummy text as you want is by using ‘=lorem(x)’ at the cursor, x being the number of paragraphs that you want to add. You will see dummy content ‘lorem Ipsum added.

If you are not a big fan of the Latin text, you can try using ‘=rand(x,y)’ to add dummy content in English. X stands for Paragraph and Y stands for the number of sentences. If you type ‘=rand(2,3)’, you will see 2 paragraphs with three sentences each.

shortcuts in powerpoint

Watch this stepwise video tutorial to get a detailed idea

PowerPoint Shortcut: How To Undo The Changes

While preparing a presentation, we might add so many elements and effects to our slides. Since making presentations is an iterative process, many times, we would like to undo the changes.

A handful of users know that PowerPoint allows you to change the number of times undo that you can perform. Let’s see the powerpoint presentation shortcuts to undo the changes.

  • Go to File and then choose Options in it.
  • Select an advanced option and enter the required number of undos that you want to have. Once you set the number of undos, you can start making changes without having to worry.

Bear in mind that the minimum number of undos is 3 and the maximum number of undos is 150. A word of caution is that more undos can slower the performance of PowerPoint.

power point shortcuts

Watch this stepwise video tutorial to get a detailed idea about this ms powerpoint shortcut

PowerPoint Shortcut: How To Hide The Slide

Microsoft PowerPoint has an interesting ‘hide’ feature that allows the user to hide a slide or number of slides that he/she wishes to.

ms powerpoint shortcut

  • If you see the image of a slide deck above, you will realize that there are 8 slides in all.
  • The content in slide number 5, 6, and 7 is a detailed explanation of the content in slide number 4.
  • In a business scenario, one may choose to not show these extra slides at all while presenting but would like to keep a backup of the extra slides in case there’s a need.
  • In such a scenario, you can select all the slides that you don’t want to be a part of your business presentation and select the ‘hide’ option by right-clicking.
  • In the image below, you can see slide numbers 5, 6, and 7 are selected and hidden.

shortcuts in ppt

PowerPoint Shortcut: How To Call The Hidden Slides Back

  • Hiding the slides has been easy. But what would you do if you want to get those hidden slides to support your presentation?
  • The simple option would be to unhide those slides and then rerun the presentation

Watch this stepwise video tutorial to get a detailed idea about this shortcut for ppt

PowerPoint Shortcut: How To Hyperlink The Slide

  • Let’s suppose you need more information to support slide number 4.
  • Select slide number 4.
  • Insert any symbol against or before the point. We have inserted 3 ovals from the shapes option in the menu bar and placed them before all the issues from slide number 4.
  • Now, the supporting information to point 1 from slide 4 is on slide 5, which is hidden.
  • So, go to the insert option in the menu bar and choose the hyperlink option.
  • Once you choose the hyperlink option, go to ‘Place in this document,’ and then select the slide that you would want to link this point with.
  • Click ‘ok’ and the slide is linked.

powerpoint keyboard shorcuts

  • So, the next time you run the presentation, if the need is, you can click on the shape before the point that leads you directly to the linked hidden slide.
  • See the image below to understand better. You can link the rest of the shapes in this slide with other relevant hidden slides and call them as and when required.
  • The shapes here have been used just for illustration purposes; you can add new text and link it, or link the existing text on the slides as well.
  • A business professional may need to use this hyperlink feature time and again, in that case, we suggest you use the powerpoint keyboard shortcuts for a hyperlink: Ctrl+k. This will work!

Watch this stepwise video tutorial to get a detailed idea 

PowerPoint Shortcut: How To Jump From One Slide To Another

  • When you are sure that all of the content of your PowerPoint presentation is relevant and has to be shown, you wouldn’t want to hide any of the slides.
  • When you start your presentation, you might get random questions. Some questions might not pertain to the slide that you are explaining, questions may be related to content from a distant slide, so do you have to browse through each slide to get to the relevant slide?
  • The answer is no. All you have to do is enter the value of that slide and hit ‘enter.’
  • You will directly switch to that slide. This way you can go back to the earlier one again by typing the value.
  • This option is very useful when your PowerPoint presentation is loaded with too many slides.
  • All you need is a handout with slide numbers on it so that you don’t have to memorize them.

All of the above powerpoint shortcuts help you become a more effective PowerPoint user. Stay tuned for more interesting blogs on this amazing application called PowerPoint.

Happy building PowerPoint Presentations !!!

Categories: blog, PowerPoint Tutorials