I've been using PowerPoint for years
in consulting in a corporate strategy role and now as a PowerPoint instructor.
And for most of that time, it's been on a PC.
That is until a couple of years ago where I switched my day to day computer
to be a Mac.
And at first, the learning curve was pretty painful.
Everything seems so much slower in the Mac version of PowerPoint,
and I just couldn't match the same efficiency that I could on a PC.
But I kept at it, and eventually I stumbled on some really useful
hacks for PowerPoint for Mac that I want to share with you today.
And I promise you it's going to completely change how you built slides
And everybody, Paul here from Analyst Academy,
where we teach people how to make better presentations
based on best practices from consulting strategy and finance.
If that sounds like something you're interested
in, make sure you check out our advanced courses at the Analyst Academy dot com.
Right now, you can also enroll in our free slide building course, which comes
with a PDF of our top 50 PowerPoint shortcuts.
We have both a PC and Mac version available.
So hope you'll check it out.
You can find links to that and our other courses down in the description below.
All right. Here we've got a pretty basic slide.
We've got a title up here with some placeholder text
and a single box also with place all the text.
And let's say I want to copy this so that there's four of these boxes on the slide.
There's a few different ways we can do this.
We can click on the box
right click and go to copy, and then right click again and go to paste.
But obviously, that's way too slow.
We can click on it, click on the box, go to copy up here,
and then click on this icon right here to go to paste again.
Too slow.
So what we're going to do, click on the box and just hold the control
key, not the command key, the control key and drag the box away like this.
And it automatically duplicates the box.
And you can do this as many times as you want.
And by the way,
when you want to and do something, of course you can go up here to and do it,
but the faster way is just to hit Command Z.
All right, so now we've got our copy shortcut.
The next thing we're going to do is add the shift key.
So instead of just hitting control and dragging it away, it control and shift
and then move the box.
And what this is going to do is it's going to copy the box,
but not just that it's going to copy it in a straight line.
So even if I move my cursor left to right here, it's not going to move.
It's going to be in a perfectly straight line.
So I can do like this and add another box and another box.
And there you go. They're all perfectly lined up.
All right. So that's pretty cool.
But now I'm going to show you a way to make this even better.
So I command Z to undo, and this time a copy the box like normal.
But now what I'm going to do is I'm going to tell PowerPoint, hey,
I want to repeat that action two more times.
And the way you can repeat the last command is hit shift command Z.
So just think of it. It's the opposite of undo.
It's going to be redo, and then I'll do it again.
And here's what's great about this.
Notice how the space between each of these boxes is exactly the same.
So if I want to do this again, I can do it really quickly.
And there we go.
I have four perfectly aligned boxes on my side.
And this sounds like a pretty small thing, but this is really going to save
you some time.
All right.
So I'll just undo those and let's say I want to instead copy this over like this.
Here we go.
Command shift, Z.
And now they're all perfectly even.
All right, so let's say I want to edit this box in the middle right here.
Just click on it, remove the shape fell.
I'm going to give it some bullet points, align it to the left,
put some black text there, and there we go.
So if I wanted to do that to this box as well,
I could do the same exact thing, go through the same steps,
change the text, remove the fill, do all that kind of stuff.
But obviously, we're going to do this much faster A really fast way to do
this is to click on the original box,
then go to Format Painter right here and then click on the new box.
And there you go.
But a slightly faster way is to just use a keyboard shortcut.
So what we're going to do,
just like your copy shortcut, which is command C,
we're just going to add the shift key.
So shift command, see click on this one.
Shift Command V, and there you go.
And now we're going to make this even better by copying it
down the side like this.
And of course, we're going to use our redo shortcut.
So just like that, we have a pretty good looking slide.
Now, just using these shortcuts alone is going to dramatically speed up
your slide building.
But let me show you a few more of my favorites
that are really going to help out.
Then afterwards, I'll show you
how to customize your setup, which is going to make a major difference.
If you want to increase the font size
of your text, Microsoft's made that pretty easy.
Just click on the text, use this dropdown right here or use this up or down arrow
and you can change it really quickly.
But an even faster way, click on your box hit shift command greater
than sign to make it bigger or shift command less than sign to make it smaller.
The other thing that's nice about this one is you can change multiple boxes of text
at one time, even if those boxes have text with different font sizes.
So I'm going to select all the objects on the screen
and then hit command shift greater than sine,
and now they're all bigger command shift less than sine.
Now they're all smaller.
By the way, if you want a faster way to select all the objects on the screen
just hit command A and it's going to select everything on the slide.
And this also works in other areas as well.
So let's say I had multiple slides out here.
I can hit command A and I'm going to select all the slides at once.
Or if I'm in this text box right here,
I can hit Command A, and it's going to select all the text at once.
All right.
This next one is one I find myself using all the time.
So let's say I want to resize these boxes right here.
I can grab this corner or I can grab this
and kind of get it to the level that I want it to be.
Right.
But the problem with that is it's a little bit imprecise.
Let's say I wanted to keep the exact same proportions of this rectangle.
What I'm going to do is hold shift and drag it in and notice
how the proportions stay the exact same.
But if we do this, obviously, it's just a little bit off.
So I'm going to take it one step further and not just hold shift,
but I'm also going to hold control as I move this.
And what it's going to do is it's going to resize it from the center.
So now they're all perfectly even.
This is especially helpful
when you're resizing photos and you don't want them to get disproportionate.
So as you can see, there's a lot of great keyboard shortcuts
for PowerPoint for Mac.
But if you really want to start getting those productivity gains,
you'll need to start customizing your setup.
And there's three different ways you can do this.
The first is the Quick Access Toolbar.
The Quick Access Toolbar is this row commands at the top of your screen.
And what's nice about it
is it's always showing no matter what ribbon tab you're on.
But the problem with the Default
Quick Access Toolbar is it uses commands that you're not really going to need.
So the big benefit is when you can customize it.
To do that, go up to your PowerPoint menu, go to preferences,
go to Ribbon and toolbar, then click on Quick Access Toolbar
And here you have the commands that are listed up here at the top
and you can remove them really easy.
Just click on the ones you don't want and click this little arrow.
The trick is you want to add commands to the ribbon
that are difficult to get to, but that you still use pretty often.
This is going to vary from person to person,
but I like to always add things related to alignment and distribution.
So I'll click on this dropdown right here and go to our commands,
find my align commands
then go down to distribute
add those.
And I like to also add the Rectangle Command.
OK, and there we go.
So now when I want to use these commands, let's say
to align these boxes to the left, just go up here and align left.
Unfortunately, you can't move the down below the ribbon
like you can't on the PC version.
But one thing you can do is you can hide this ribbon.
You do that by hitting option command. Ah.
And now you're just a little bit closer.
The next thing you can do is actually customize the ribbons themselves.
So these little dropdowns up here with all the commands in them,
you can add your own group.
So section of commands within each ribbon tab
or you can even add your own ribbon tab.
So to do that, just go to your PowerPoint preferences,
click on the same button here.
And then on the ribbon tab right here, go down to this plus arrow and hit new tab.
Let's rename this
piece mode
So now and here
I can add all the new commands that I use all the time.
So let's say I use this one, this one,
and we'll add format painter in there for good measure.
And the regroup command.
There you go. It's safe
inside of this.
And here we have our own tab.
And of course, you can add as many commands here as you want.
You can group them into different sections.
And this is sometimes helpful if the type of commands that you use
maybe are a little bit different or they're a little bit hard to get to.
Then the final way you can customize
your setup is actually just to create your own Apple shortcut.
Let's say
you have something you use all the time and there's just not a shortcut for it.
You can add it to Apple's list of shortcuts.
So just open up the system preferences of your computer,
go to keyboard and shortcuts.
An abstract cuts and just click this plus sign right here.
And what you're going to do
is you're going to enter the exact command name in this menu title right here.
So let's say I want a keyboard shortcut for
distribute vertically
and now I have to think of a keyboard shortcut for it.
So usually this becomes more of a trial and error thing, but
I'm going to go with control command V,
then I'll hit add because it's out.
Now, let's say I want to distribute this vertically.
So these are all even
higher than my boxes.
Again, I can go up here to the shortcut.
I can go to the actual ribbon menu.
If I had it in my beast mode tab, I could find it there.
But right here, I'm just going to hit control or command the
and they go in there.
You can do this for as many shortcuts as you want.
You could, for example, have one for all of these align shortcuts up here.
But again, the trick is finding available combinations on your keyboard.
And by the way, if you have a keyboard shortcut
and you go in here and it just doesn't
work, that usually means it's because it's taken by something else
either in another program or maybe even in PowerPoint.
So just play around with it until you get it right. All right.
That's going to do it for today's video.
I hope you found it helpful.
Here's a list of all the shortcuts that we covered today.
And by the way,
if you want to screenshot this, just hit command shift four on your keyboard
or if you want to download the full PDF, you can find that at our website, the A.C.
Academy dot com.
We've also got lots of other great free stuff there.
Including our free slide design course.
So I hope you check it out.
Thanks again for watching and best of luck.