- It is one of the best programs to create presentations, but we don’t always know how to exploit it
- Like any application, PowerPoint has some basic tricks that you should learn
- What are these procedures like and what does each one contribute to your slide creation?
PowerPoint is one of the main programs included in Windows and needs no further introduction, although we believe that most users only take advantage of a small percentage of its ultimate potential. Fairly, Despite the popularity of presentations made in Office, we know that there are some PowerPoint tricks that not everyone knows about. and it is on these practical solutions that we want to stop today.
The idea is to focus on short but useful procedures, the kind that raise the level of productivity achieved. You’ll appreciate them more if you use PowerPoint daily than if you use it once in a while, but in all cases, you will probably find one that makes your day to day easier with this application.
5 essential tricks in PowerPoint
Select objects faster
One of the keys to working with PowerPoint is selecting objects that are in the presentation or that should be included in it, so it makes a lot of sense to try to select them faster so as not to waste time.
What you are going to do is resort to the Selection Panel, which is too hidden for its usefulness. You have to get to it from Start, Select and look for the last option of the new drop-down menu on the screen.
The panel will display all the objects on the page in order of display, as if they were layers of an image. You will be able to move freely and select the objects you want, as well as rename them and many more.
Trimming like a pro
The PowerPoint cropping tool is another of the essentials, and in this aspect we must say that it can save you especially when importing an image or photograph, with the advantage that it is possible to customize the trim.
There are many who ignore this issue, but if instead of Crop in Image Format you press the arrow located below this menu, you’re going to go into Crop to Shape and choose some other clipping format.
Not all ways will always work for you, keep that in mind, but from time to time you will be able to play something else. When you don’t want to or can’t, just go back and set Aspect Ratio, 1:1.
Higher quality graphics
Something similar happens with bar graphs and columns and that is, if the entrusted task leads you to it, you have designs that break out of the boring colored rectangles and that will capture the attention of your listeners.
Prepared the image or icon for the subject that we are going to graph, you have to right click on it, pressing the icon of the paint bucket and Filled with image or texture, inside the open panel on the right.
Chosen the design, press Insert to apply it on the image or the icon and make any other adjustments. Entering Series Options and then Series Overlay and Range Width you can customize everything.
PDF from PowerPoint
Despite the fact that it was not its original function, PowerPoint allows us to produce the classic files in PDF format.
Surely you will not find major problems in this regard, but it is important to clarify that you can make different modifications, such as change the orientation of the document to a vertical format, the traditional PDF.
You must go to Design, Slide size, Customize slide sizeand there you will find endless customization-oriented options to tweak the width and height of your page, for example by converting it to an A4 sheet.
Before leaving, remember to go to the Slides section, to move the file from horizontal to vertical.
When saving the file, select PDF as the format instead of one of the PowerPoint ones.
Random paragraphs in different languages
In the middle of the tests so that your documents and presentations remain as they should, you may require some paragraphs, regardless of what they say and what language they are inand PowerPoint will help you with that.
Until a few versions of this program we had to look for the typical Latin text that many portals adopted but, luckily, Office developers added this element those of your application.
Anywhere in the file, just type “=lorem()” and press Enter to bring up the Latin text. If you don’t want it to be Latin but another language, write “=rand()” to make the text in the PowerPoint language.
Of course, do not forget to remove it later, because it would not be the first time that someone has missed a lorem ipsum.
Which of these PowerPoint tricks that not everyone knows – but now you do – do you find the most interesting?
Do you want to learn more? Here are other things you didn’t know you could do with your slides.
