We all know that presentations are a crucial part of jobs. Whether you’re presenting data to your team, pitching an idea to the board, or standing before a crowd with a product demo, it’s vital for everyone in the business to be able to present their ideas effectively and confidently.
Many factors can make or break a presentation, but one of the most powerful is PowerPoint design. In this post, we’ll go over 10 PowerPoint tips and tricks to design your slides more effectively. So, you can create better presentations and impress anyone who sees them!
1. Lock A Particular Image in PowerPoint
PowerPoint makes it a piece of cake to change the appearance of a picture or object. But one frustrating aspect is that you can’t lock an individual part of a photo so you won’t accidentally move it.
To prevent yourself from being frustrated, hover your mouse over the image and press CTRL+1 on your keyboard. You’ll see that little ‘L’ appear next to your cursor to make changes of your choice for personalized content and ads.
2. Loop A Slideshow In Your PowerPoint
You’re running out of time during a presentation and need to speed up—for those situations; there’s the Repeat command. With it, you can set PowerPoint to play a slideshow automatically for a certain number of times or until you manually stop it. To do this:
- Open the dropdown next to the Repeat command
- Choose an option from 1 slide, five slides, or All Slides
3. Reduce Size Of A PPT File
There are times when you need to send someone else your presentation because you’re out of town and don’t have access to it yourself. But because there’s so much stuff in it, you can’t email it as is because even though it might seem small at first glance, once opened on somebody else’s computer. They’ll be struggling for time just trying to finish opening the file before their computer implodes.
- That ‘something that makes large opening presentations take forever is all those pictures.
- Also, other assorted objects are usually used to create an effective PowerPoint presentation that looks more professional.
- You can quickly reduce the size of your presentation if you want by removing all those tiny objects cluttering the slides.
- Replace them with simple shapes like squares, circles, triangles, etc.
- When finished editing your presentation, press CTRL+A first, go to File > Save As, and type in a new name for your smaller file.
4. Add and Print PowerPoint Notes
Are you giving a PowerPoint presentation that includes text boxes? Perhaps you’re doing it because you’ve decided to drop annotations into your slides. Or maybe there are bullet points within one of the text boxes on the screen?
- Whatever the case may be, when presenting these slides, it’s best practice to print out or display your notes to the audience.
- Doing this will make sure everybody knows what you’re talking about during the presentation.
- It makes for a better experience all around (and not just because it could prevent confusion, but also because you’ll feel like less of an idiot if something goes wrong).
To do this:
- Open up your notes, select them and copy them by pressing CTRL+C
- Go to File > Print Layout or View > Normal so that text boxes are no longer visible on screen (they appear when printing or displaying your document in Slide Show mode)
- Paste the notes onto the slide by pressing ALT+INSERT, selecting ‘Text Box,’ then placing where you want the notes to be in PowerPoint templates.
5. Edit/ Change PowerPoint Backgrounds
This tip is more of a workaround than anything else. Still, it could get you out of trouble in a hurry, especially if your presentation was already created and now has some random background that’s ruining everything for everybody. Hence, making it difficult to read any text on the slides because you’re also trying not to go blind from all this white.
- The trick is simple enough: open up your slide in Slide Master view so that your new background will appear behind the one already there.
- Now delete it using the Delete key or pressing DELETE on your keyboard until it’s gone.
- Also, take care only to delete excess blank space rather than other objects which should remain intact (text boxes, shapes, etc.). Use these PowerPoint design tips for a good PowerPoint presentation.
6. Linking To Other Slides In The Presentation
Do you ever need to link two slides together quickly? But don’t want to create a complicated hyperlink connection via Action Settings or whatever other method you might use? You can easily do this by right-clicking the slide you want to be linked to, choosing ‘Go-To.’ Then, please type in the number of slides you wish to go to (the code will automatically be generated).
Also Check: How to Make Your Own Facebook Cover Photo
7. Stay Consistent By Using the Format Painter
Formatting makes PowerPoint presentations look more professional. But what if you have 20 slides that need a similar configuration? So they all look exactly alike with no significant changes aside from a few texts edits here and there? You could manually apply each change by editing one slide, copy and pasting it to all the others. Also, you can use Format Painter.
To do this:
- Click on the desired format you want to be copied (for example, a particular font)
- Press CTRL+C then go to another slide where you want that same formatting applied instead
- Click on the object with the desired formatting (font in this case), then press CTRL+SHIFT+V.
- The new formatting should be applied instantly! Use these PPT tips in your next presentation for effective engagement.
8. Look Smart with SmartArt
Do your slides look like crap? Want them to look better? You could try adding more text or other objects until it looks somewhat decent, but there might still be something missing that will either make them look boring or amateurish. Or you could add some SmartArt that will help in the design department and give your slides a little more flair and pizzazz. And who doesn’t want that?
To use these fantastic graphics, select a slide in your presentation, then go to Insert >SmartArt to choose from several different types such as Process, Cycle, or Hierarchy.
9. Align Your Objects
Have you ever seen a PowerPoint presentation where all the objects were justified perfectly within their containers? It might seem like magic. But it’s just another Microsoft PPT with one slight variation. Instead of clicking on the alignment buttons to line up things correctly, click on the objects you want to be line up. Then right-click and choose ‘Align Objects’ to choose from seven different options.
10. Use Picture Layout
Sometimes we need something more than simple text and shapes for our PowerPoint slides. So how about pictures? They can make things much more exciting and help engage the audience, which is always a good thing. But there’s also a trick to resizing photos so that they’re the perfect fit after positioning them on different parts of your slide.
To resize a photo within its container:
- Click on the photo then go to Format tab > Size and either type in or use arrows/sliders to adjust dimensions yourself
- Right-click and choose ‘Picture Layout.’
- From here, you can do things like Rotate and flip the photo, but we want to choose ‘Frame Shape’ first.
- Now select a shape that best fits your image.
All you have to do is use these instructions to make sure objects are always positioned perfectly in your slides!
Summing Up
We hope you’ve found this blog post to be helpful when it comes time for your next presentation. By following these PowerPoint tricks, we’re confident that your presentations will resonate with the audience in a way they never have before! Make sure to bookmark this blog post for future reference!
Maryam has been teaching IT as a school teacher for over a decade, and her main subject of choice is Internet safety, especially helping parents keep their families safe and secure online. When Maryam is not teaching or writing she is a big fan of the outdoors, the complete opposite of staring at a computer screen for hours.