Clear the screen. While you’re giving a presentation in Slide Show mode, here’s a good way to quickly hide the slide so the audience focuses on you rather than the screen. Press B to make it black or W to make it white. Press any key to return to the normal Slide Show mode.

Increase/decrease font size. Watch professional graphic designers at work, and you’ll notice that few of them change a font’s size by highlighting it and using the drop-down font size menu at the top of the screen. It’s fairly slow, and who knows whether the best-looking size is 26, 28, or 36 points? Instead, most designers use shortcut keys to bump the font size up or down a few points at a time until it looks right. In PowerPoint, you do this by highlighting the font and pressing CTRL-SHIFT-> (increase font size) or CTRL-SHIFT-< (decrease font size).

Move through text. In the same vein as the point above, you rarely see professional copy editors moving through blocks of text by pressing the arrow keys or moving the mouse on the scroll bar. Instead, they jump rapidly through copy with the CTRL key and arrow keys, which moves the cursor a full word (Left and Right arrows) or a paragraph (Up and Down arrows) at a time. And, bonus! Here’s your chance to use those HOME and END keys you’ve probably never pressed. HOME moves you instantly to the beginning of the active line, and END moves you to—you guessed it—the end of the line. Add CTRL to these keys to move to the top or bottom of the entire text block.

Move between task panes. This one’s especially useful when you’re composing text in a slide at the same time you’re writing notes to yourself in the Notes pane. Press F6 (you may need to press it more than once) to jump from the main PowerPoint work space to the Notes pane just below it without taking your hands off the keyboard. You can use F6 to move back to the main work window, but you’ll need the mouse this time because the cursor won’t land inside the text box you were working in previously. However, if you use F6 to move back to Notes again, the cursor will land where you last left it.

Hide/show the Ribbon. If you’d like a little more screen real estate for your work, you can hide most of the Ribbon by pressing CTRL-F1. You’ll still see the titles of each tab, and clicking them reveals the associated commands. Click the tab again to hide the commands. To restore the normal Ribbon, press CTRL-F1 again.

Select everything on a slide. Sometimes you may want to select all the words or objects on a slide for use in something such as a big copy-and-paste operation. To select all the text in a block, press CTRL-A while the cursor is in the text block. To select all the objects on a slide, press CTRL-A while the main pane is active.

See every function’s shortcut key. We’ll close by pointing out that every icon and menu in PowerPoint is accessible through a shortcut key. When you press ALT-H, a number or letter appears beside nearly all of them. Press that key (without anything else, like CTRL or ALT) to access the function. These so-called Key Tips are great for the true shortcut-key junkie, but in many cases, you’ll probably find it just as easy to stick with the mouse

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