Microsoft PowerPoint Efficiency Guides – Tips for Making PowerPoint More Efficient
PowerPoint Efficiency Tips
Even though PowerPoint is considered to be one of the more streamlined applications in the Microsoft Office suite, there are still a lot of tips and tricks that you can use to make presentation creation more efficient. Here, we’ll take a look at some of our most popular articles dedicated to improving the ease and efficiency of creating PowerPoint presentations.
Hyperlinks
When most people hear the term hyperlink, they think of linking to a web page or some specific file on the Internet. The hyperlink feature in PowerPoint is capable of creating these types of links, but it can also be used for other purposes. For instance, you may have a particular slide that you want to reference several times in one presentation. Or, you may be worried about time and want to plan ahead for a possible alternate ending to your PowerPoint slideshow.
Rather than copy slides and insert them in multiple places, you can just include one version of each slide and then use hyperlinks on other slides to go to that point in your presentation. For more information on how to do this and on other uses for hyperlinks, see Meryl Evans’ article Using Hyperlinks in PowerPoint Presentations.
Using Slides from Other Presentations
No matter what type of presentation you’re creating, you’ll often want to include slides that have similar layouts or content (or both) as slides you’ve created in other presentations. For instance, a budget presentation for May of 2009 probably isn’t going to look that different from April of 2009 except for changes in the numbers. Similarly, if you’re planning a research presentation for school, the content of that presentation may be different than previous ones, but certain slides – such as the title and summary slides – could use the exact same layout.
Instead of recreating these slides, you can use one of the features in PowerPoint that lets you insert slides from other presentations and then make the minor modifications necessary for the slide to fit into your current slideshow. The method for doing this depends on what version of PowerPoint you’re using, but you can take a look at How to Use the PowerPoint Slide Finder for details on how to do this in PowerPoint 2007 as well as in older versions of the application.
Creating Macros
Older versions of PowerPoint have a nice tool called the macro recorder that lets you easily automate repetitive tasks, much like the macro recorder still found in Word and other Office applications. Unfortunately, the macro recorder is not part of PowerPoint 2007, but you can still create macros using Visual Basic for Applications in this version of the software. While this is a more complex way of creating macros, it’s also much more powerful.
Alternatively, there are several third-party macro creation programs on the market that you can use with any Windows application. One relatively inexpensive, yet very robust, application of this type is Macro Express. This software lets you record and run both mouse and keyboard macros.
For more efficiency tips as well as other types of user guides, be sure to visit the PowerPoint section of Bright Hub’s Windows Channel. New and updated items are being added all the time, so bookmark us and check back often.
