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6 PowerPoint Keyboard Shortcuts from the Pros

May 17th, 2012
With content and corporate training demands seemingly at an all-time high, it’s not just about doing more; it’s about doing more – faster. Fortunately, when creating PowerPoints for live presentations or on-demand Brainshark videos, you don’t have to be an expert to save a little time.

In an earlier Brainshark webinar, Marsh Makstein of eSlide shared his top 10 PowerPoint tips to increase your speed. During one part of his presentation, Marsh demonstrated a handful of his favorite PowerPoint keyboard shortcuts. Here are a few highlights that even the most inexperienced PowerPoint novice can use.

#1. Keep images aligned when moving them

For your presentations to appear neat and professional, it’s important to make sure that all of your shapes and images on a given slide are in perfect alignment. As you probably know, PowerPoint lets you drag these items and position them however you want. But by holding the SHIFT key, you can move them left-to-right and up-and-down while maintaining their original alignment. Easy!

#2. Duplicating images and keeping them aligned

It’s simple to create multiple versions of the same shape or picture in PowerPoint, but when you use a shortcut, it’s even easier. Simply highlight the item you want to duplicate, hold CTRL + ALT, and drag the duplicate to put wherever you want. Furthermore, by holding SHIFT + CTRL + ALT, you can ensure your duplicate stays in perfect alignment with the original shape or image.

#3. Undo the last thing you did

As with other Microsoft applications, undoing a mistake is simple. For a keyboard shortcut, click CTRL + Z to quickly undo your last action in PowerPoint.

#4. Increase or decrease text size

Adjusting font size in a slide or document is nothing new. But to quickly fit the text the way you want it, you can simply highlight your text, hold SHIFT + CTRL and use the greater than (“>”) and less than (“<”) keys to make it larger or smaller on the fly.

#5. Toggle text case (lower case, title case and all caps)

Rather than adjusting the case of your text manually, you can once again highlight the desired words and use the SHIFT + F3 shortcut. Each time you hit F3, the highlighted text will change to all lower case, all caps, or title style where only the first letter of a word is capitalized.

#6. Zoom in/zoom out

For a closer look at your slides (and only your slides), you can use the CTRL + MOUSE WHEEL shortcut. Spinning your mouse wheel forward will zoom in on your current slide, while spinning it down will pull your view back.

Simple right?