Wanna make your next presentation pop? Microsoft PowerPoint presentation program comes with intuitive and a lot of strange features you might not heard of. Do you also feel like uhh?
When it comes to Microsoft PowerPoint, it may be feel like that there’s not much more left to learn. May be you have been using it for decades so what else could there possibly be? Here we’ll dive into some new and interesting tools that will let you make dynamic presentation. Some of you guys might be familiar with these, but there must be some that you haven’t heard of. These hacks that will gonna flash on your screen, stay tuned…
PowerPoint recently got some new productivity features that you might have missed and got some improvements on existing features so that you can present with confidence and make your slides more engaging.
So, here it is..!
Best Microsoft PowerPoint Hacks and Tricks to become a pro
WORD TO POWERPOINT
This feature has been there for a while, but you may have overlooked it because it can only be accessed online. So, if you put a lot of effort into creating a word document, you may now be asked to prepare slides based on the document to be presented at the following meeting. With Office 365, you can accomplish it quickly.
- Simply open your Word document on the web.
- Select the file menu, and click the export option
- Select export to PowerPoint button to make it happen..
- You can select from a variety of themes here. Each time you run this, you will gonna see entirely new themes than what you have seen previously.
Simply just pick the one that you think fits best and click on export.
- Click on the open presentation to get the final result.
You should be aware that it only presently supports the English language and does not import any tables or graphics that you may have created in Word. You undoubtedly receive a good presentation of the text because the designer AI is at work. It tries to figure out what kind of image to display. You will also gonna have a chance of changing your title slide with different ideas from designer AI.
- Your data will be presented according to the color scheme.
- You can off course go ahead and update the texts, images and color as you choose.
- It just helps you to save a ton of time than if you were gonna create this from scratch.
AUTO FIX IN MICROSOFT POWERPOINT
PowerPoint already has some great features for aligning objects. It now has an even greater feature called auto fix.
With auto fix it tries to figure out how to best align and fix the objects. So take a look at this,I have these different objects as they’re the same shape but different size and spread out not so nice on the slide. To align them better just try to perform the step below.
- Select all the elements you are having on the slide.
- Right click one of the element and click on the shape option from the menu toolbar
- In the drawing group, left click on arrange.
- Click on auto fix to make it done.
- This will align, distribute and uniformly resize all the selected and straighten any connector between them.
This feature works on different shapes as well or a combination of shapes, icons and even images. It does not however work on smart art, grouped and overlapping shapes.
- Auto fix button will not be available if :
- You aren’t connected to internet.
- No element or only one element is selected.
This feature is currently only available on web.
LOCK OBJECT
So, you have your objects perfectly aligned and you don’t want to accidently shift or distort them by mistake. Because it is simple to start typing, you might start moving stuff around and messing up your attractive designs.
- So to lock the objects on your slide, you have to open up your PowerPoint presentation in the desktop app.
- You are going to select the elements that you want to lock.
This makes sure that you can’t move these objects anymore. This is something I always tend to do is by mistake. Do you too experience this?
You can prevent shapes from being positioned incorrectly in PowerPoint by locking objects like photos, icons, 3d models, shapes, links, and connectors.
I end up moving the title of the slide. You can lock that as well.
- Select the title of the slide and right-click on it.
- Then, lock the element from the context menu.
- Now you can’t move that too.
You can make changes to the text and color of your object. You just can’t change the size and can’t move them around.
- If you want to apply animations to these locked objects, you can.
You can also send them to the back or bring them to the front from the shortcut bar itself. By locking them in place you prevent accidental changes from happening.
- If at any point in time you want to unlock them, just follow these:
- Select the objects that you want to unlock.
- Right-mouse click on it and unlock them.
- Now you can move these around and adjust the size as you need.
PRESENTER COACH
Are you ready with your perfect slides? So yeah, your presentation is visually stunning and perfect but that’s only half the work. You still have to present it and bring your points across.
That’s the part that terrifies me and a lot of people.
Public speaking can be stressful but it just gets better with practice. So might be good to rehearse giving the presentation in advance. Now ideally you want to rehearse with a non judgmental audience, where you can get objective feedback.
But if you feel awkward in front of a person you might find it easier to rehearse with a machine. That’s where presenter coach comes to the rescue.
It’s a feature that’s been around for a while at least in PowerPoint for the web and also in the preview channel in the desktop app but not many people knows about it. Recently it got additional features for the web version, where it also examines your body language as well.
So here is how it works.
- You just go to slide show option.
- Select rehearse with coach option
- With coach you will gonna get this nice welcome box
- Click on got it.
- Now you are going to start rehearsing. Just notice that the coach is listening.
- When you are finally done with your presentation, you will get this wonderful report about your pace.
- So the built-in AI listens to you and if you have your camera activated it’s going to watch your body language as well during the presentation.
- You would get a warning when you are too far or too close to the camera. When you look away from the camera or cover your face or break eye contact you are going to get a warning. Why because you need to make a connection with your audience.
- Off course you can go back and repeat the rehearsal until you feel confident to present in front of a real audience.
CAMEO
You have probably delivered many presentations in teams with your video on and you were someone around the corner. But what if you could be part of your presentation?
Cameo the latest feature that’s released by Microsoft in PowerPoint allows you to do that. This is just a placeholder for your camera feed. By doing so,you can insert your live video feed directly into your presentation
- You just have to go to insert and then select cameo.
- Then, a tab appears along the placeholder for your camera feed.
- Select the camera icon to turn on the video.In a shared doc. only you see the video feed.
- If you have multiple cameras, select preview to pick one. You can apply the same effects to your camera feed as you would to pictures
Including
- Shaping
- Formatting
- Layering
- Styles
Use the anchors to adjust the placement and sizing.
You can adjust your camera styles.
But the great thing about this is that it’s just a shape just like any other shape in PowerPoint. You can put it behind objects and you can copy and paste it multiple instances. So, when you are ready, you can present in the slide show mode or present in teams. Teams automatically switches to the cameo mode but you can switch to the different presenter mode if needed. Okay let’s go to get this nice and smooth feature in work.
AGENDA TO PRESENTATION IN POWERPOINT FOR THE WEB
This will let us really quickly create a really nice presentation from just an agenda. You must have aPowerPoint deck here in the web to accomplish.
- The first step to be followed is go to design.
- Now designer AI will give you some options and the first thing you need to do is add a specific design to your deck itself.
- So click one which will going to look cool. Now you are going to choose insert and going to add a new slide here and choose a basic titling content. Click add slide to add new.
- Write your agenda right here in bullet points and over here on the right you’ll see the designer recognizing these bullet points and ask to add five more slides based on same theme immediately into the deck.
If you want to change some, designer gives you a whole lot of ways to very quickly generate a really nice looking presentation.
IMMERSIVE READER
An immersive reader is a tool that was inclusively designed to help people who struggle with reading might be dyslexia, vision impairments or it could be someone who does not speak the native language. This feature is available in many apps but now it is in PowerPoint for the web.
- So, on the slide you are having, select the bunch of text and right click on it.
- Choose the option “open in immersive reader”.
We call this focus mode where we have reduced distractions in the user interface.
- If you go to the bottom here and hit the play button, it will read the whole text out loud.
- You can also change the voice setting by clicking on the button which is right next to the play button.
- You can go to the Aa menu and open the bar from where you can increase spacing. This reduces visual crowding which some people experience and can make it easier to phrase text.
- You can also change the fonts and background colors really easily and these are tuned for accessibility.
Thinking about vision impairments, some prefer to have couple of words per line in short line mode.
- We have something called line focus so this will help you focus your eye on a specific line.
- In this feature, when we click on words we are going to see pictures dictionary.
- From here you can also translate your text into 70 languages.
For going to the original text, just hit the back button to exit the immersive reader.
CHANGE CASE IN MICROSOFT POWERPOINT
- Select the text which you want to replace.
- Select Change case under Home menu.
- Click Sentence case to capitalize the initial letter of a sentence while keeping all other letters lowercase.
- Click lowercase to remove capital letters from your text.
- Click UPPERCASE to make all of the letters capitalized.
- Click Capitalize Each Word to capitalize the initial letter of each word while keeping the remaining letters lowercase.
BREAK TIME
This is a feature provided to us by PowerPoint under add-in option. Sometimes you need to give presentations that go over many hours and you want to add breaks in there. Attention is precious and attention needs breaks. However, the issue is that, people are tardy in returning. Incorporating a timer right into your PowerPoint presentation is a great approach to keep everyone on the same page.
- To get this add-in, go to office add-ins.
- Look for break time and add this in.
You can just adjust the size and position of this, just like any other object.
Down here you can select the minutes and the seconds. Now you can decide on the theme that you want to place the timer.
Now whenever you want to run this just hit the start button.
QR4OFFICE IN POWERPOINT
Let’s say at the end of your presentation, you want to leave a contact to your website, social media or the download link for the presentation material. Off course you can show the URL but making easier for them and includes a QR code that is going to take them directly to your links page or website.
- What all you have to do is down below:
- With an add-in called QR for office u can easily generate such QR codes.
- If you have already downloaded it, just go to my add-ins and grab it from there.
- Type the URL that you want to share and insert it on the slide wherever you want to.
Winding up
No one can master it because of its broadness itself. To discover all of PowerPoint’s secrets, all you need is some patience and curiosity. Each of these tips is intended to make your presentations appear better and make you more productive.
Never stop hustling; it doesn’t end up right here.
When thinking about how to advance your career, PowerPoint is the most crucial step one must follow.
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