PowerPoint For Dummies, Office 2021 Edition
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PowerPoint 2021 is the most powerful presentation software available to create and edit slideshow presentations for work, home, or school. PowerPoint offers a number of helpful keyboard shortcuts for performing tasks quickly.

Take a glance at some of those shortcuts below for common formatting, editing, and file and document tasks. Additionally, after you’ve created your masterpiece, you can use a number of shortcuts when running your slideshow.

PowerPoint 2021 formatting shortcuts

If you’re ready to format text in PowerPoint 2021, this table gets you on the road toward ooohs and aaahs of doing so. If you use PowerPoint templates as the basis for your presentations, your text is already formatted acceptably. To really pull out the pyrotechnic stops, however, you have to know a few basic formatting tricks.

Command Shortcut Ribbon Location
Bold Ctrl+B Home tab, Font group
Italic Ctrl+I Home tab, Font group
Underline Ctrl+U Home tab, Font group
Center Ctrl+E Home tab, Paragraph group
Left Align Ctrl+L Home tab, Paragraph group
Right Align Ctrl+R Home tab, Paragraph group
Justify Ctrl+J Home tab, Paragraph group
Normal Ctrl+spacebar Home tab, Paragraph group

 

PowerPoint 2021 editing shortcuts

Like any good Windows program, PowerPoint 2021 uses the standard Undo, Cut, Copy, Paste, Select All, Find, and Replace commands. These commands work on text that you’ve selected; if you’ve selected an entire object, the commands work on the object itself. In other words, you can use these commands with bits of text or with entire objects.

Command Shortcut Ribbon Location
Undo Ctrl+Z Quick Access Toolbar
Cut Ctrl+X Home tab, Clipboard group
Copy Ctrl+C Home tab, Clipboard group
Paste Ctrl+V Home tab, Clipboard group
Select All Ctrl+A Home tab, Editing group
Find Ctrl+F Home tab, Editing group
Replace Ctrl+H Home tab, Editing group

 

PowerPoint 2021 file and document shortcuts

You can do a lot with PowerPoint 2021, and having shortcuts for the things you do most often is very handy.

Some of the things you’ll frequently do in PowerPoint include creating, saving, and printing new presentations, as well as opening existing presentations, adding new slides, and getting help from PowerPoint.

The following table tells you the shortcuts for these common actions.

Command Shortcut Ribbon Location
New Ctrl+N File tab, New command
Open Ctrl+O File tab, Open command
Save Ctrl+S File tab, Save command
Print Ctrl+P File tab, Print command
Help F1 Help button at upper right of Ribbon
New Slide Ctrl+M Home tab, New Slide command

 

PowerPoint 2021 slideshow shortcuts

PowerPoint 2021 is designed to create slides that are presented directly on a screen rather than printed out. The screen can be your computer’s own monitor, a projector, or an external monitor, such as a giant-screen TV.

In most cases, the default settings for showing a presentation are adequate. However, in some cases, you may want to take control and run the slideshow yourself.

The following table lists the shortcuts you’ll most often use when running a slideshow.

To Do This . . . Use This . . .
Start a slideshow F5
Advance to the next slide N
Perform the next animation Enter, Page Down, right arrow, down arrow, or spacebar
Go back to the previous slide P
Repeat the previous animation Page Up, left arrow, up arrow, or Backspace
Go to a specific slide Type the slide number and then press Enter
Display a black screen B
Display a white screen W
End a slideshow Esc
Go to the next hidden slide H
Display a pen cursor Ctrl+P
Display an arrow cursor Ctrl+A
Hide the cursor Ctrl+H

 

About This Article

This article is from the book:

About the book author:

Doug Lowe is the bestselling author of more than 40 For Dummies books. He's covered everything from Microsoft Office to creating web pages to technologies such as Java and ASP.NET, and has written several editions of both PowerPoint For Dummies and Networking For Dummies.

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