Most of us have sat through or given PowerPoint presentations. Often, it seems like something goes haywire. In a perfect world, you just press F5 to start the presentation. All your carefully crafted slides look lovely in full-screen Slide Show View as you seamlessly move through your topics. Unfortunately, in the real world, things rarely go perfectly.
The problem is that usually someone in the audience has a question about a topic that you either talked about earlier, or haven’t gotten to yet. So you have to zap out of Slide Show View into PowerPoint, go into Slide Sorter View, and rummage around looking for the slide with the information you need. Retaining any sort of suave demeanor while you’re rummaging like this is just about impossible.
However there is a much cooler way to swiftly get to a particular slide while you’re presenting. And you don’t have to leave Slide Show View. The key is to know thy keyboard shortcuts while presenting. If you have access to a mouse, the easiest thing is to right-click or press Shift+F10 to bring up the shortcut menu. On it, you’ll see an entry called Go To Slide. It pops out to show you a list of your slides. Just select the slide title and PowerPoint takes you there. As an aside, creating descriptive titles for your slides makes it easier to identify them in the list.
Alternatively, if you really know your slides, you can actually just type the slide number and press Enter. PowerPoint jumps to that slide. If you have a whole lot of slides, you also can bring up the All Slides dialog box by pressing Ctrl+S. Then you can scroll through your slides by title. The dialog box is easier to work with than the pop-out menu if you have a really big presentation.
Ctrl+T is another handy keyboard shortcut to know if you have to switch to another application. This shortcut brings up the Taskbar. Again, you don’t have to leave Slide Show View, so no one has to know how messy your Windows desktop really is.
One last note, if you’ve completely freaked out and forgotten all of these keyboard shortcuts, press the F1 key for a complete list. And calm down; it’s only PowerPoint.