In the first two parts (Links: Part 1, Part 2), I addressed the creation and presentation of slides. In this final part, I would show you some bonus features.

Narrate your presentation

This has been made even more important in the “Zoom era” as the COVID pandemic boosted the popularity of online learning. After completing all the edits on your PowerPoint project, head to the slide show tab and click “Record Slide Show.” This would display the entire presentation in full screen then you will speak to the presentation. Your voice, the slide changes, the pointer, pen and any other feature you use would be recorded with the corresponding slide. You will then do that for each slide till the end. Pretty straightforward right?

 

Set up slideshow

This gives you freedom to customise your presentation to your target audience. You can skip some slides, show or hide animations, ignore or enable timers to advance slides, etc. As shown above, this feature is accessed under the “Slide Show” ribbon. The commands are shown below.

Add media to your presentation: Screen Recording, Screenshots, Inserting Pictures, Video, and Audio files

Though screenshots and screen recording are more commonly used on mobile phones, they can also be utilised on PCs. You can screenshot either the entire display or a portion of it. This lets you insert parts of webpages or documents as pictures into your presentation. The same applies to screen recording which is inserted as a video.

You can also insert audio files, videos and pictures from files on your PC or from the web. For example you can post YouTube links into slideshow and during your presentation, the video would play automatically.

There are a lot more details under this section but I would not go into them else the article would get too lengthy. All these features can be found under the “insert” ribbon.

 

Other Useful Shortcuts

ACTION	SHORTCUT KEY
Create a new slideshow	‘Ctrl’ + ‘N’
Insert a new slide	‘Ctrl’ + ‘M’
Duplicate the current side	‘Ctrl’ + ‘D’
Increase font size	‘Ctrl’ + ‘Shift’ + ‘>’
Decrease font size	‘Ctrl’ + ‘Shift’ + ‘<’
Display the font dialog box	‘Ctrl’ + ‘T’
Change case	‘Shift’ + F3
Zooming in	‘Ctrl’ + ‘+’
Zooming out	‘Ctrl’ + ‘-’
Spellcheck	‘F7’
Opens Save As dialog box	‘F12’
Stop/restart the show	‘S’
End the slide show	‘Esc’
Activate the pen tool during a show	‘Ctrl’ + ‘P’
Erase pen tool drawings during a show	‘E’
Change the pen to a pointer during a show	‘Ctrl’ + ‘A’
Hide the pointer or pen during a show	‘Ctrl’ + ‘H’
Insert hyperlink	‘Ctrl’ + ‘K’
Group Items (with items selected)	‘Ctrl’ + ‘G’
Ungroup	‘Ctrl’ + ‘Shift’ + ‘G’

Shortcuts Source: Veritas

 

I do hope you picked up a useful tip or two along the course of this trilogy. For any questions, feel free to use the comment box or send the author an email. I recommend this tutorial video on MS PowerPoint if you want to know a lot more.

Now, my watch is over.