Essential Keyboard Shortcuts for Navigating PowerPoint Like a Pro

You should be very comfortable with the basics of navigating PowerPoint when you are doing a presentation. It looks rather unprofessional when someone gets up in front of an audience and has difficulties in the middle of their presentation. Here are some helpful PowerPoint keyboard shortcuts that will help you navigate through your presentation.

One of the most helpful keyboard shortcuts is using the Space Bar to advance to the next slide. Of course, you can use Page Down, however the Space Bar is a much larger target and it’s easier to hit that if you are nervous or your hands are shaking, and that will help you get through the slides without hitting the wrong key.

Another helpful keyboard shortcut is hitting the Alt key plus the one or two or three digits that represent a slide number and then hit Enter to jump to a specific slide. You should know the numbers of the key slides in your presentation, whether that means memorizing them or having an outline or a list in front of you. That way, if you get to a point in your presentation where there are questions, and you need to jump back to a key slide, you are able to go jump directly to that slide rather than Page Up or Page Down through multiple slides.

Remember to “right click” to access a number of features on the context menu. There are a number of interesting features there that you can access that may help you in doing your presentation and just to show a few of those to you now…if you right click, it pops up a menu that looks something like this. There are a number of options presented to you. If you select “Go” and then by title, there is listing of both slide numbers and titles for your presentation. You can then click on a particular slide and you will jump directly to it.
There are a number of settings for changing your pointer options. You can change your pointer to a pen and change colours of that pen and then draw circles on your slide to highlight.

If you want to jump to your opening slide, at the end of your presentation (in order to emphasize a point), you can press “Home” to jump to the very first slide in your presentation. If for some reasons you don’t get to the end of your presentation, and you want to jump to the end, simply hitting the “End” key will jump you to the very end slide in your presentation.

Good luck with your next presentation.