Unlocking Success: The 5 Most Loved PowerPoint Tips from Corporate Training

At the end of every training session, I go around the room and ask for everybody’s game changers. And guess what? I see the same things coming up over and over again. I’ve compiled a list of these and am sharing it in this article!

Number 5

Coming in at number 5, we have the Presenter View. The Presenter View lets you see your notes on your laptop while the audience sees only your slides. You can only use the Presenter View with a second monitor connected to your computer, like when you are hooked up to a monitor in a meeting room. In addition to seeing your notes, the Presenter View allows you to see the next slide in the deck, zoom into a slide while presenting - to highlight part of an intricate diagram, perhaps - annotate your slides, use a laser pointer to highlight content on slides, and my personal favourite is the See All Slides function where you can navigate to any slide in the deck without scrolling through the slides in between.

When you finish a presentation, and someone asks to see a slide at the beginning, you can go straight there in a few clicks without flicking through every slide in your deck. Another use for See All Slides is when you run out of time. How often have you heard a presenter say, “I don’t have time for those slides. I’ll skip them.” This always leaves me wondering what I’ve missed, and that’s all I remember from the presentation - that I missed out on something. With See All Slides, you can go to your last slide without your audience knowing. Perhaps you can include those slides in your next update.

Here’s a link to a YouTube video with a demo of the Presenter View;

PowerPoint’s Presenter View

Number 4

Claiming the 4th spot is image cropping. How often have you seen a slide where someone wanted to fill a space and squashed the image to fit? I always see this, and it’s not a good look! Instead, you can crop an image to a predefined size, for example, a ratio of 1:1 to give you a square. You can also crop to a shape and have the option to pick any shape in PowerPoint. My favourite is to crop to an aspect ratio of 1:1 and then crop to an oval, which gives a perfectly circular image. This is great for headshots.

Number 3

In 3rd spot is grouping. This feature allows you to group a selection of items together and then move them around the slide as one or resize them all together (after locking the aspect ratio, of course!) ?A point to note when grouping items is that if you don’t lock the aspect ratio of the group, it will become distorted when you try to resize it, and let’s be honest, nobody looks good when squashed.

Number 2

In 2nd place is format painter. I’m guessing that some of you may be familiar with this tool, as it can be used across the Microsoft suite of products. For those who don’t know about it, it’s a tool that allows you to copy the formatting from text and paint it onto other text. Highlight a word, click Format Painter to copy the formatting, and click on the word or sentence to which you want to copy the formatting. Did you know that double-clicking the Format Painter button switches it on until you switch it off, allowing you to paint the formatting to text on different slides throughout your deck? Click the format painter button once again to switch it off.

Number 1

Claiming the top spot at number one, we have the Alignment tools. With these tools, you can align content relative to each other or the slide. Say you have five objects on a slide; you can align these to match up at the top (or bottom of the middle) and distribute them equally between objects.

Here’s a YouTube video demonstration of the Alignment tools

Alignment tools in PowerPoint

Thank you for reading this article. I'd love to hear your feedback on these tips, and if you need bespoke PowerPoint presentation training within your organisation, please reach out!

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