Long presentations are difficult to manage. They become longer over time. Moving between topics becomes cumbersome. The solution is to use PowerPoint Sections. Read it. You will wonder why you did not know this for 4 years!
Reading time 5 min.
Contents
The need
All of you have faced this issue.
Presentations become long. You keep adding and modifying them. Rearranging becomes difficult. Jumping to a particular topic becomes difficult.
Copying only a part of the presentation to share with someone requires complex multi-select activity.
The solution – PowerPoint Sections
Divide the presentation into various sections. Once this is done, you can more around entire sections, collapse them and jump to a section during a presentation.
This feature was added in PowerPoint 2010.
How to add sections?
Go to slide sorter view. Click on the left side of the first slide. Right click and choose Add Section.
By default it will be called UNTITLED. Press F2 key to edit it (right click on section name and rename also works, but F2 is so much simpler.
Remember – F2 is the EDIT key – in many places. You probably know about Excel formula edit. But it is useful for file / folder name edit as well.
Now look at the slides and find out the next logical segment. Right click before the new topic starts and add another section. Again press F2 and Rename it.
Do this for all topics.
Collapse All
Once you have sections, you can reduce the clutter by only seeing the sections and hiding slides.
Double clicking on a section hides all slides. You can also click on the small triangle next to the section name to open and close it.
But if you have many sections, right click on any section name and choose Collapse All.
Now you can see the overall picture.
Rearranging the presentation
Just drag and drop the section to another place. It is best done while sections are collapsed. Otherwise you will get confused.
Selecting slides
Clicking on the section name selects all slides within it. This way you can copy only a section and paste it elsewhere.
Disadvantage
Once you have sections created, CTRL A or Select ALL can never select all slides. It will only select all slides in the current section.
Other than this, I don’t know of any disadvantage. If you find any, please let me know.
For whatever reason if you want to remove all sections, right click on any section and choose Remove All Sections.
Creating PowerPoint Sections as the first step
Now that you know about sections, it is a good idea to incorporate them from the beginning while creating a new presentation.
First add PowerPoint Sections and then add slides to them. This way, you have more control over the presentation from the start. It will also help you to put down your higher level thoughts quickly. Rearranging is so easy now that you don’t have to worry about the order in which you are adding thoughts or topics.
How to jump to a section while presenting?
Read this article for details: Jump to a different topic while presenting
One Response
Awesome! Its so simple to employ this technique and so useful. I realised that I have seen tons of long presentations but none have so far used this technique! Thanks a lot for the share sir