Being skillful and efficient at creating presentations in PowerPoint will help you go far in impressing clients with your communication skills. When you’re creating a presentation, you want to spend your time perfecting the ideas, not formatting the slides. Since there are no plans to expand the 24-hour day, how can you make the best use of your time to, as John Wooden said, ”Be quick without hurrying”?
We’ve compiled a list of 10 basic PowerPoint keyboard shortcuts to help you breeze through creating your presentations. If you use one that isn’t featured, tell us about it. Send us an e-mail describing the shortcut and its function. We’ll compile all the submitted shortcuts into a download.
PowerPoint keyboard shortcuts
[Shift][F3]
This shortcut changes the text case. For example, if you type Here is my presentation but want it in all caps, highlight the text and press [Shift][F3] to change the case.
[Ctrl]K
If you want to embed a link in your presentation, highlight the text and press [Ctrl]K to bring up the Edit Hyperlink dialog box.
[Ctrl]N
Do you need to produce more than one PowerPoint presentation? [Ctrl]N starts a new one quickly.
[Ctrl]T
Change fonts and formatting without using Format | Font. Highlight the text you want to change and press [Ctrl]T. To change the text on your entire presentation, highlight the slides in the task pane and then press [Ctrl]T to open the Font dialog box.
[Ctrl]F
Just as in Word and Excel, you can use Find—[Ctrl]F—to search for words in your presentation.
[Ctrl]E
Highlight your text and press [Ctrl]E to center a paragraph.
[F7]
Long after your audience has forgotten you, they’ll remember what you misspelled in your PowerPoint presentation. Make [F7] one of the last shortcuts you use to spell check your work before wrapping up your presentation.
[Ctrl][Shift][>], [Ctrl][Shift][<]
If you need a different font size, use these shortcuts to increase or decrease the size. For example, if you highlight a block of text in your presentation and use [Ctrl][Shift][>], you’ll increase the font by the same increments found in the Font dialog box. If you want to decrease your font size, [Ctrl][Shift][<] will take it down.
[Alt]U
Need to add lines, shapes, or a flowchart to your presentation? [Alt]U will open AutoShapes on the Drawing toolbar.
[Ctrl][=], [Ctrl][Shift][+]
Highlight text and use [Ctrl][=] to apply subscript formatting. Press [Ctrl][Shift][+] to apply superscript formatting.
