Have you ever find yourself frantically clicking your mouse to get to the right slide that your audience ask you? If you do, we have some simple tricks that you can use to move between slides easily.

To accomplish this, we’ll show you how to create a sidebar navigation and slide numbers to get to the right slide.

A sidebar navigation is our own fancy word for a section on our slide that shows each slide title.

image

We can use anything to create a side bar. Our personal favorite is the “Shapes” library in Powerpoint. Pick a shape that fits your slides, for us we chose a white rectangle.

image

Once we have placed the sidebar container onto our slide, we need to put our slide title onto the sidebar container. There are two options for us to create text: the text tool, or the word art. We recommend that you use the word art, because PowerPoint will create an ugly blue text with underline when you apply a hyperlink to a text in a text tool.

image

Put an appropriate text that best describe the topic of your slide.

image

Highlight the title, and insert a link to the title, so that we can move between slides by clicking the title.

image

Powerpoint lets us place a hyperlink to a webpage, or a slide within our powerpoint presentation. Make sure that you choose the correct slide title for your hyperlink.

image

You do not have to create a sidebar for each of your slide; you can copy the sidebar that you just created, and copy it on every slide in your presentation. You’ll find that the sidebar not only give you a quick way to move between slides, it also become a visual guideline that shows the topic of your slides to your audience.

image

Although clicking the sidebar title can be convenient to some of us, wouldn’t be great if we can move between slides using a single keyboard press. To achieve that, we’ll use slide numbers.

image

Slide Numbers

Slide numbers are not only great to show where we are at in our presentation, slide numbers are useful for jumping to slide by pressing the number keys on our keyboard.

image

Select the slide number checkbox, and click “apply to all”, and your Powerpoint should have a page number on the bottom right corner of the slide.

image

If you are interested to know what these slides is all about, you can read our article on how to create pixel art avatar in Photoshop or GIMP.

Feel free to share other Powerpoint tips that you know with the other fellow readers in the comments section.