Synopsis
Cheat sheet showing all PowerPoint shortcuts as well as highlights of my favorite shortcuts that you may not have seen.
Download Cheat Sheet
Video Synopsis
Today I’m going to go over some of my favorite shortcuts in PowerPoint 2010. You don’t need to take notes because I have all of this on a one page, printable, job aid and I’ll give the link for download at the end, and I’ll also put it in the screen cast. But today we are going to go over the PowerPoint ribbon, the quick access toolbar, and also some shortcuts. Some you’ll know, and some will probably be new to you.
With that, let’s go ahead and get started. So in PowerPoint 2007 they first introduced the ribbon and that’s the area up here. The layout is a lot different than it was in PowerPoint 2003 and earlier versions. It’s a little confusing at first, but it’s actually a really nice visual layout where you can click through the tabs and see more of what you are going to do.
You can learn these on your own just by — by clicking around. One thing that a lot of people don’t know though is the hot keys. So if you hit the alt button, you’ll see it opens up the little letters here. And what that means is you can type that letter, and you can use that as a shortcut.
So let me click off of these. So if I were to hit alt N, for insert, and then you’ll see there is a P for picture, it will go ahead and open that up. So I could just drop an image right in there. And that’s true for the rest of the commands too.
And what’s nice is that it’s very visual. So when you hit alt, it will show you what letter. And the ones that you frequently use, you’ll memorize over time. Now in PowerPoint 2010, they actually allow you to customize your ribbon but I choose to leave my ribbon how it is. Just so that it’s the standard settings, so if I use somebody else’s computer I know where things are.
What I do instead is I use the quick access toolbar. And that’s this area here. And it will stay on the screen no matter which tab you click on, you’ll see that this area stays there. And I put some of my most frequent and useful tools there. In general, I group them — here I have all of my alignment, then I have distribution, and I have some of the text things, and formatting objects. And then have some miscellaneous section here, where I have some layering and other items as well.
So I don’t have time to go over everything. Let’s just fly through a couple of these. Let’s say these — these aren’t aligned, and I want to align them, I can select all four of these and I can click align left. And I can also do align right or whatever.
Then there is also something called distribute. Let’s say I wanted these three sticky pads to be an equal distance apart. If I just move the left one and the right one where I want — oops. I accidently hit control there. And I want these to be equally distributed, I can just click all three, and then distribute them evenly. And you’ll see they’re spread out the same distance. I use that one a lot.
For the fonts, I just like having the font control know what — what size I have, what sort of font. And then the same thing with the shapes. One of the really useful things with shapes, is let’s say these are all different sizes, I could go here and make them the same width. And now if I were to align them, you’ll see they both left and right align. And that’s useful for other things like pictures as well.
Some of the other things within PowerPoint 2010 that’s new, is some of the shape union. So I can take these two objects, I can select them, and I can create a single shape — whoops. I should have put them together. Let me get out of that, drag it on top of each other, and now I have a single shape that I can drag around.
Some of the other useful things, I might have this guy here and I want to change the direction that he is facing. So I — I keep my flip horizontal there so he can — I can change where he is facing. I also like to have the selection pane here, it controls the layers, but that’s a whole lesson on its own.
Let’s go ahead and close that out. Now you don’t need to memorize all of these here, but I — I like to keep this as a job aid. Some of these shortcuts, you’re going to know copy and paste, and undo, and I don’t have time to go over all of them, although I will do some lessons in the future.
But there is a few here that you might not know about. You know? Like copy format, it’s kind of like the format painter. I could click on here, do control, shift, C, and I could paste, control, shift, V, and it copies that format over.
Some of the other things that are neat, you can lock aspect ratios by holding shift, and I’m running out of time here. You know, you can play around with these on your own. It — I have this one page that shows everything, and I’ll post the link in the screen cast notes. And if also you go to the home page and tools, you can find it there.
