PowerPoint shortcuts
I would guess that almost all teachers who have a projector use PowerPoint at some point. One thing that I find useful in helping to make the use of PowerPoint presentations as smooth as possible is keyboard shortcuts.
Instead of using the mouse to navigate the presentation using the keyboard makes a variety of actions quick and easy to access.
There are lots of shortcuts that can be used during presentations (as well as in editing), here are a few that I think are particularily useful:
- F5 – Start presentation
- Esc – End presentation
- B – Turn the screen black (press it again to continue the presentation)
- W – Turn the screen white (press it again to continue the presentation)
- Ctrl + P – Turn the pointer into a pen so that you can annotate the slide
- Ctrl + A – Change the pen back into a pointer
- E - Erase any annotations you have made with the pen on the slide
- Number + Enter – Jump to a slide by number (e.g. 5 + Enter would take you to slide 5)
- Home – Jump to the first slide
- A - Hide/show the pointer arrow (toggles between them)
If you have an interactive whiteboard (or even if you don’t) the annotation feature is really useful for temporary notes on your slides. The annotations are kept (unless you erase them) while you are in the presentation, but are not saved when you end the presentation.
To make these easier to remember, I have made a hint card that you can print out and will sit above a computer keyboard.
You can download it as a Pdf by clicking on the picture or link below.
PowerPoint shortcuts reference card (Pdf)
If you want to learn more PowerPoint shortcuts there are load of detailed resources on the web. Here are some that I have found to be useful:
PowerPoint 2003 shortcut keys – Big list of keyboard shortcuts for all areas of PowerPoint
PowerPoint 2003 quick reference card (Pdf) – Detailed reference card for working with Powerpoint 2003
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