The 10 Most Helpful Microsoft PowerPoint Shortcuts

As a professional or student in today's world, chances are that you will have to make a slide presentation at some point in your work. In business, academic, and otherwise settings, these presentations are helpful in communicating new ideas or discoveries, elucidating the status of an organization, making projections about the future, and more. Chief among the applications and software used to make such slideshows is Microsoft PowerPoint, the product that effectively boosted the slideshow trend and presented a new way to, well, make presentations.

Microsoft has innovated incrementally on the PowerPoint user experience; without question, the software's offerings today are superior to what was available 20 years ago. Keyboard shortcuts have played a major role in this growth, as they give users a commendable level of control in how they can use the application. At the basic level, there are shortcuts to open an existing slide document, create a new presentation, or save your current work. For more niche purposes, such as when a user wishes to work with the thesaurus or spell check feature, there are shortcuts for that, too. Put simply, the value of keyboard shortcuts in PowerPoint lies in boosting your productivity and speed in designing slides, while giving you tools to perform specific functions if you can't remember the orthodox method.

Just like Microsoft Word and Microsoft Excel, using shortcuts in PowerPoint adds a new dimension to the experience. We discuss these shortcuts below in 10 categories, from fundamental to advanced.

Going into the application itself, it's also pretty simple to interact with both text and non-text elements on a slide using keyboard shortcuts. Whether you wish to cut (Ctrl + X on Windows and Cmd + X on macOS), copy (Ctrl + C on Windows and Cmd + C on macOS), or paste an element (Ctrl + V on Windows and Cmd + V on macOS), these shortcuts have got you covered. Plus, if you want to perform any of these commands on several elements on a slide, you can highlight (Ctrl + A on Windows and Cmd + A on macOS).

Speaking of selection, keyboard shortcuts on PowerPoint allow for more dynamism in selecting elements on a slide. With text elements, for instance, you can extend the highlighted text by one character to the right (Shift + right direction key on Windows and Shift + Option + right direction key on macOS), one character to the left (Shift + left direction key on Windows and Shift + Option + left direction key on macOS), one word to the right (Ctrl + Shift + right direction key on Windows and Shift + Option + right direction key on macOS), or one word to the left (Ctrl + Shift + left direction key on Windows and Shift + Option + left direction key on macOS). If you're going for a wider scope, there are shortcuts to extend by one line up (Shift + up direction key on both Windows and macOS), one line down (Shift + down direction key on both Windows and macOS). Any of these might come in handy depending on your use. 

When you're not working directly with text, you certainly will be inserting some form of slide object — images, shapes, and even text boxes — into your slides. When these elements are not inserted in the size or form that you prefer for your presentation, you can format them using shortcuts. Most helpful to you might be the shortcuts to increase the width of an object (Shift + right direction key on both Windows and macOS), decrease the width (Shift + left direction key on both Windows and macOS), increase the height (Shift + up direction key on both Windows and macOS), or decrease the height (Shift + down direction key on both Windows and macOS). There are also shortcuts to rotate an object clockwise by 15 degrees (Alt + right direction key on Windows and Option + right direction key on macOS), rotate counterclockwise by 15 degrees (Alt + left direction key on Windows and Option + left direction key on macOS), and duplicate a selected object (Ctrl + D on Windows and Cmd + D on macOS).

If an object is not correctly placed on the slide, you can use the keyboard to move it by small margins in any direction. The up, down, left, and right direction keys correspond to moving an object up, down, left, and right respectively, on both Windows and macOS devices. Other object-based shortcuts include grouping a selection of objects (Ctrl + G on Windows and Cmd + Option + G on macOS), and ungrouping the selection (Ctrl + Shift + G on Windows and Cmd + Option + Shift + G on macOS).

Besides moving within and between slides in the presentation, it's also possible to alternate between tabs using shortcuts. If you will be implementing transitions and animations in your slideshow, then you will find these shortcuts to be extremely helpful. Plus, the best part about the tab navigation shortcuts in PowerPoint is that they're set up to never be forgotten.

Upon pressing the Alt key, the letter or letter-number combination that corresponds to a tab shortcut will appear under the name of that tab on the ribbon. You can then press that letter to navigate to the respective tab. So, it is seen that the letter N corresponds to the "Insert" tab, G to the "Design" tab, K to the "Transitions" tab, A to the "Animations" tab, S to the "Slide Show" tab, R to the "Review" tab, and W to the "View" tab, among others.

But that's not where it ends. These shortcuts extend to the features and functions housed within the tabs. For example, after pressing Alt + N to navigate to the "Insert" tab, letter or letter-number combinations also appear under several panels within that tab. Pressing those characters will either expand the panel to reveal more options or execute the function if there is only one. A quick use of this shortcut reveals the letter T corresponding to the "Tables" panel, the letters SI for "Slides," SH for "Shapes," M for "SmartArt" and C for "Charts" in the "Illustrations" panel, "ZG" for the "Images" panel, and many more.

If you ever find it arduous to work with the "Insert" tab on PowerPoint, then keyboard shortcuts can get you to your desired command faster. In this regard, you can use them to insert an image (Alt + N + P on Windows), insert a shape (Alt + H + S on Windows), add a new slide to your current deck (Ctrl + M on Windows and Cmd + Shift + N on macOS), or even introduce Word Art into the presentation (Alt + N + W on Windows). As is evident from these shortcuts, not all are available on macOS devices.

There's a similar level of flexibility when it comes to using keyboard shortcuts for deleting text elements on a slide. It goes without saying that you can easily delete one character to the left (Backspace key on Windows and Delete key on macOS) or to the right (Delete key on Windows and Fn + Delete key on macOS), but did you know you could delete one word to the left (Ctrl + Backspace on Windows) and one word to the right (Ctrl + Delete on Windows)? These last two are not available on macOS devices, so it seems to be the case that Windows PC users have the upper hand with respect to PowerPoint shortcuts.

There are several other keyboard shortcuts that might come in handy, whether frequently or sparsely, while using the PowerPoint software. Some of these, like the Find function (Ctrl + F on Windows and Cmd + F on macOS), the Find and Replace function (Ctrl + H on Windows and Cmd + H on macOS), the hyperlink function (Ctrl + K on Windows and Cmd + K on macOS), the Spell Check feature (F7 on Windows and Cmd + Option + L on macOS), and the Thesaurus feature (Shift + F7 on Windows and Cmd + Option + Shift + R on macOS) work on PowerPoint like they do on other Microsoft software. Others may be rather peculiar to PowerPoint.

A business owner or company executive can use keyboard shortcuts to add symbols that represent the intellectual property of their business, rather than visiting the "Insert" tab and painstakingly searching for them in the "Symbols" panel. The three major symbols with shortcuts are the Trademark symbol (left parenthesis + TM + right parenthesis on Windows and Option + 2 on macOS), the Copyright symbol (left parenthesis + C + right parenthesis on Windows and Option + G on macOS), and the Registered Trademark symbol (left parenthesis + R + right parenthesis on Windows and Option + R on macOS).