Of all the programs in Microsoft Office, PowerPoint is easily the one that requires the most artful usage. Novelists might use Microsoft Word, but you’d never be able to tell that based on what you read on the page. The difference between a good presentation and a bad one, however, has a lot to do with what you see on that PowerPoint deck, and how it was put together.
We can’t help you find that perfect cartoon or meme to kick off your talk, but we can help you work more efficiently and easily within PowerPoint. Take a look at these 15 helpful keyboard shortcuts to gain more control over PowerPoint—and how polished your presentation looks for next week’s budget meeting. (For more polishing help, read PCWorld’s guides to spicing up your PowerPoint backgrounds, animations, and text effects.)
These shortcuts will work with PowerPoint 2013 and 2016.
- Keyboard access to the ribbon: Just like Excel and Word, one of the key shortcuts to know is how to activate Key Tips. Pressing Alt labels each menu item with a letter, allowing you to navigate the program from your keyboard.
- F6: Move clockwise between panes in Normal view.
- F4: Repeat the last action.
- Shift + F6: Move counterclockwise between panes.
- Alt + Shift + Left Arrow: Move one paragraph up.
- Alt + Shift + Right Arrow: Move one paragraph down.
- Alt + Shift + Down Arrow: Move selected paragraphs up.
- Alt + Shift + Down Arrow: Move selected paragraphs down
- Ctrl + Shift + >: Increase the font size.
- Ctrl + Shift + <: Decrease the font size.
- CTRL + M: Add a new slide.
- Alt + Shift + F9: Show/Hide the ruler
- Shift + F3: Cycle the case for the selected text.
- Ctrl + Home: Jump to the beginning of the first word in a text container
- Ctrl + End: Jump to the end of the last word in a text container
- Alt + Right Arrow: Rotate selected slide object by 15 degrees clockwise (Using this shortcut with the left arrow does the reverse) [“source -pcworld”]
