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Secret PowerPoint Keyboard Shortcuts You Can Use While Giving Presentations

2 minute read

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Here are some great keyboard shortcuts to make delivering your PowerPoint presentation a lot easier. These allow you to manipulate your presentation while sharing it with your audience, which can be useful if you need to jump around or adjust on the fly while making a presentation.

  • You can activate the next animation or move to the next slide by hitting any number of keys, including N, Enter, and the space bar. But what happens if you want to go backwards? Just hit the P key, up arrow, or backspace key to return to the previous slide.
  • What happens if someone asks a question about a specific slide that you’ve already shown? Instead of having to jump around slide by slide, you can just enter the number of the slide and hit Enter, and you’ll jump right to your desired slide.
  • Another thing that can happen during a presentation is someone can ask a question that is slightly off topic. Sometimes, it’s nice to remove the slide on the screen in order to just focus on the discussion, and you can do this by hitting a B to get a black screen, or a W to get a white screen. The same key will return you back to your presentation.
  • Instead of the normal pointer that you normally have, you can change it to something more interesting. For instance, if you hold CTRL + P (Windows) or ⌘ + P (Mac), you can change your pointer to a pen. If you hold down CTRL + A (Windows) or ⌘ + A (Mac), you can get an arrow instead. A third option is to hold down CTRL + E (Windows) and get an eraser.
  • This isn’t technically a keyboard shortcut, but it’s a shortcut nonetheless. If you hold down the left mouse button for a few seconds, you’ll jump back to the beginning of your presentation.

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