Love it or hate it, PowerPoint is ubiquitous when it comes to formal presentations. Perhaps you are pitching a new proposal. Or, perhaps you’ve spent weeks number-crunching or conducting intensive research and it’s time to communicate your findings to the relevant stakeholders. Whatever your purpose, PowerPoint is arguably one of the most important components to your success.
When I was a management consultant I lived in Microsoft Excel and PowerPoint, toggling between the two programs every day. I loved that PowerPoint’s flexibility allowed me to illuminate and transform data into a story—a story of financials, an industry’s growth trajectory, or recommendations for restructuring a business process. However, especially as I was just starting out, this flexibility often proved to be a double-edged sword. It was frustrating how tedious slide design could be, and how long it took to aesthetically perfect a slide. I often found myself making a decision between spending copious amounts of time on PowerPoint slides, or creating a basic, minimalist deck that risked sacrificing the effectiveness of the data and the message. It wasn’t until I mastered PowerPoint tips, that I no longer experienced this dilemma.
This article showcases a selection of advanced PowerPoint presentation tips and tricks, which will enable you to become quicker at using the tool. It will hopefully also prevent you from sacrificing effective messaging in an effort to save time. While many PowerPoint articles provide qualitative advice around effectively delivering a message, this piece focuses on the technical components of PowerPoint and presentation design. It utilizes functionalities and commands in Microsoft Office PowerPoint 2016 and 365 for PC. Let’s get started.
Though this article is designed more for the advanced PowerPoint user, it may be useful to kick off with a refresher of some basics do’s and don’ts for creating effective PowerPoint presentations. Subsequently, we may then delve into some of the nitty-gritty of PowerPoint’s more advanced features. Through my career, the following four rules have long served me well:
Rule 1 - Keep Your Deck as Simple as Possible: Likely the most important PowerPoint rule, “less is always more” with great presentations. Avoid clutter; minimize flashy, complex slides with distracting clipart in motion; and always focus on delivering a clear and succinct message.
Rule 2 - Keep Each Slide to Just One Key Takeaway: Resist the temptation to throw the kitchen sink at your audience, in general, but especially on a per-slide-basis. You will hold your audience’s attention far more easily and leave them with more tangible, digestible takeaways simply by limiting the scope of your content to just one key point per slide.
Rule 3 - Use Simple, High-Quality Graphics Often and in Place of Words: As an addendum to Rule 1, too many words on a page tends to be both tedious and a bore for your audience, often resulting in a loss of focus, or “content fatigue,” during your presentation. GIFs, graphs, charts, and other informative and relevant illustrations tend to be great ways to break up tedium and add dimension to your flow.
Rule 4 - Clean and Simple Formatting Will Take You Far: Clean bullet points, consistent color themes, soft font styles, and legible font sizes all go the distance in leaving a great, professional impression on your audience as you present a polished finished product. Calibri (font), in metallic grey (primary color), punctuated by sky-blues (secondary color) have worked wonders for me over my career. Feel free to adopt them.
The first step to becoming a PowerPoint expert is building your Quick Access Toolbar. It’s a customizable toolbar sitting above the ribbon, where you can add your favorite and most frequently-used commands. Invest five minutes to set it up, and you won’t regret it—it’ll pay out in dividends each time you use PowerPoint thereafter. Here’s a quick lay of the land before we delve into the logistics:
To customize your toolbar’s functionality and ordering according to your preference, simply click the white downwards-facing arrow above your ribbon. Then click “More Commands” → Choose Commands from “All Commands” → Select and add your favorite commands. If you want to remove any commands, simply select the command and hit “Remove.”
My “must-haves” for the ultimate quick access toolbar (QAT):
Align: The alignment tool is hands-down my favorite tool in PowerPoint. Bypass the futile, manual effort and instead highlight the shapes you want to align, and choose which direction to align them. You can align objects to the middle, right, left, top, and bottom of each other. Keep in mind that the positions of the objects are all relative to each other.
If you want to use this tool outside of your QAT: Highlight your desired objects → Format tab in the ribbon → Click Align → Select your preferred alignment direction → The objects will be aligned.
Distribute: If you have multiple objects or shapes that you want to make equidistant from each other, this tool will be your new best friend. Before distributing objects, it’s best to first align them. Then, to distribute, simply highlight the objects you want to distribute, and select “distribute horizontally” or “distribute vertically.”
If you want to use this tool outside of your QAT: Highlight your desired objects → Format tab in the ribbon → Click Align → Select Distribute Horizontally or Distribute Vertically → The objects will be distributed.
Format painter: Allows you to copy the formatting from one object and apply it to another one. It is essentially copying and pasting, but for formatting and not content.
If you want to use this tool outside of your QAT: Select the object you want to mimic → Click Format Painter once or twice in the Home tab in the ribbon → Click on the object you want to change → The formatting changes will be applied .
Rotate: As the name implies, this feature enables you to rotate objects, in increments of 90 or 180 degrees. You can rotate a text box, shape, WordArt, or picture. This includes rotations to the right 90 degrees, to the left 90 degrees, vertically, and horizontally.
If you want to use this tool outside of your QAT: Highlight your desired object(s) → Format tab in the ribbon → Click Rotate → Select your preferred rotation option → The objects will be rotated.
You might think I’m exaggerating, but once you realize you don’t have to manually perform these actions, you won’t look back. Generally, utilizing PowerPoint does not require memorizing as many hot keys as Excel does, but there are a few that you should be aware of.
Easily change the order and indent-level of bulleted text in text boxes:
Resize an object while keeping them regular and in proportion:
Micro-nudges (small nudges for your objects):
Duplicate your shape or object without copy & paste:
Ensure that your lines are actually straight:
Transform a number into a footnote superscript:
Adjust the case of your text by toggling between text cases (lowercase, title case and all caps):
If you’ve worked in PowerPoint consistently, you’ve likely encountered the following conundrums. Instead of spending an unnecessary 15-30 minutes Googling the issue for a workaround, here’s how to navigate the situation every time:
Example Situation: I’ve got a list of boring bullets and I need inspiration to make them more polished.
Solution: Leverage the “Convert to SmartArt” tool.
Select the text box with the bullets → Under “Home” in the ribbon, Select “Convert to SmartArt” → Hover over different SmartArt options to see your bullets transformed → Select whichever SmartArt strikes your fancy, and continue to edit from there
Example Situation: I used multiple shapes/images in the slide and I want to change their collective size without messing up the proportions.
Solution:
First, group all the objects together. To group, highlight all objects and either right click → Group, or highlight and hit ALT + G.
Then, adjust the size with your mouse while holding SHIFT to keep the proportion. This will help you resize and fit multiple objects without distorting the original proportions and shapes.
Example Situation: You need to utilize a specific, custom color but you can’t seem to find it in the color palette.
Solution: The eyedropper tool quickly identifies the exact color you are looking to match, and applies it to the text or object you are trying to change. While format painter can be helpful for applying the exact same formatting (size, coloring, etc.) from one object to another, sometimes you might only be looking to apply the same color. In these cases, the eyedropper tool is very helpful.
A common use case for this tool is for pitch decks. If you are looking to match the theme of the deck to the potential client/partner’s logo, the eyedropper tool can prove invaluable.
Example Situation: I’m trying to draw arrows from one shape to another, but the arrows are crooked and look unprofessional.
Solution: Use the arrows with an elbow connector (90 degree angles). They automatically snap to the center of an object, and can be formatted in different colors and sizes. These are especially helpful when building organizational charts.
Example Situation: I’m typing a text label into a shape, but the text doesn’t fit and breaks the word into two lines.
Solution: There are two ways to go about it:
Example Situation: I used an image from the web in a slide and I want to change the background image color but can’t figure out how to do it.
Solution: This technique is most effective when used on images with high contrast.
Example Situation: You want to convert a datatable into different formatting on another slide, but you don’t want to manually type the numbers in and risk a mistake.
Solution: Break your table into multiple text boxes and objects, which saves you the trouble of retyping the data and will be easier to manipulate
Example Situation: You’ve created and filled a table with data, but the size of some rows or columns do not match the others. Your OCD starts to kick in but you can’t figure out how to get them to match perfectly.
Solution: Use the “Distribute Rows” and “Distribute Columns” tools.
Create custom deck templates using Slide Master, which can be found under the “View” tab in the ribbon. Slide Master allows you to quickly modify the slide design in your presentation. You can either customize the slide master, which will affect every slide in the presentation, or you can modify individual slide layouts, which will change any slides using those layouts.
Rely less on your eyesight when moving objects around with the Guides or Gridlines view. First, you should adjust your settings to utilize the “Snap-to-Grid” function. Here’s how to do so: “View” tab → Click on the “Grid Settings” next to the word “Show” → Enable “Snap objects to grid. If you’d like to view the actual guides or gridlines, you can select these options under the “View” tab in the ribbon; they can easily be turned on and off. Please note that you can move guides around, while gridlines are set.
Link a chart from your Excel workbook to your PowerPoint presentation to enable dynamic updating of numbers.
On busy slides crowded with data, visually highlight your main takeaway at the bottom. A rectangular box (as shown below) is common.
Remember to include keys with your graphs and charts to help orient your audience.
Have you ever felt déjà vu when designing a new PowerPoint deck? It’s probably because we often create new slides to convey similar concepts, even if the content is different—be it a process, progress, or an organizational chart. At the end of the day, it makes sense to reuse a slide structure even if the actual content refreshes. To communicate these common concepts, many of the largest consulting firms repeatedly utilize the following slide components:
Project Schedule: Gantt Chart
Organizational Structure: Organizational chart
Process: Arrows leading into one another
Indicating the degree to which a particular item meets a criterion: Harvey Balls
Thus, As I began, so shall I finish. PowerPoint presentations don’t have to be painful. Like most personal and professional skills, practice, consistency, and attention will get you most of the way there. Once you become familiar with the application as a powerful productivity and storytelling tool, gain comfort with its nuances and logic/flow and, dare I say, begin to leverage this article as a how-to companion, you might actually find yourself beginning to enjoy building PowerPoint presentations as you transition toward mastering it.
In the interim, if you are interested in reviewing some top consulting presentations that put a lot of my content into practice, feel free to browse 30 McKinsey presentations and a mix of Mckinsey, Boston Consulting Group and The Parthenon Group decks.
With that, happy building!
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