hi everyone kevin here today i’m excited to show you my favorite top 15 powerpoint tips and tricks if you’re interested in following along i’ve included a link to the powerpoint presentation in the description also if you want to jump around i’ve included time stamps as well all right let’s jump on the computer and see what these are for tip and trick number one we are going to look at the morph and the enhanced morph transition so what does it mean to morph well let’s take an example so we could see how this works to apply a morph first off we need to duplicate the current slide i’m going to go up to slide 1 in the slide sorter i’m going to right click on it and then i’m going to go down to duplicate you’ll see now that these slides are exactly the same i want to morph the circle from slide one into the circle in slide two now i don’t have to just morph it into the same position instead i’m going to reposition it i’m also going to adjust the size on this circle next i’m going to go up to the top ribbon i’m going to click on transitions and i’m going to click on morph you can now see that between slide number one and slide number two it morphs from a smaller circle in this position to a larger circle in the right let me throw it up into presentation mode and we can see how it works this is a basic morph transition and you can apply some pretty cool effects using this now one of the downsides though is with a basic morph you can only morph between identical shapes between the various slides what if you want to morph from say a circle into a square well let me show you how we can do that i’m going to insert another slide and on this slide i’m going to go up to insert on the ribbon here i’m going to click on shapes and i’m going to insert a rectangle now i want this circle to morph into this rectangle how do we do this well first off on slide 3 let’s click on the slide and then go up to transitions once again i’m going to click on morph but right now we see that when i run the basic morph i’ll throw it in the presentation mode there i get my bigger circle and there it simply fades in and out to the rectangle how do we get the circle to morph into a rectangle well we need to ensure that both the rectangle and the circle share the same name to make sure that they share the same name let’s click on the rectangle then click on home on the ribbon and we’re going to go over to the selection pane i’m going to click on select and then click on selection pane within the selection pane i see that my rectangle simply has a name rectangle 3. i’m going to change this name and we need to insert exclamation marks i’m going to insert two exclamation marks and then i’m going to type in morph to do an enhanced morph you need to make sure that you include exclamation marks but the name itself doesn’t necessarily matter you just have to make sure that this name matches for the shape here and the shape that you want to morph from i’m going to copy this name and now i’m going to jump into slide 2. i’m going to click on the circle here and with the selection pane open i’m going to click in here and paste in the same exact name powerpoint now knows that it should morph this shape into the rectangle let’s jump into presentation mode again and see how this looks i’m now on slide two and let’s jump into slide three there you see the circle morph into a square that is a pretty cool transition and that’s tip number one tip number two i wanna show you how you could insert a perfectly symmetrical shape and also lines to do this first off let’s go up to the ribbon and click on insert and then we’re gonna click on shapes first i want to insert a circle or an oval i’m going to click on this and here i’m going to start drawing it on my slide now if i want to make sure that this is a perfect circle i could try to line it up but i might not be quite right if i want to ensure that i have a perfectly symmetrical shape i can simply press the shift key and this will ensure that i have a perfect circle i could use this for any type of shape i’m going to go back to shapes and now i’m going to insert a rectangle i’ll press the shift key again and here now i have a perfect square now not only can i use it with circles or squares i could also click on shapes and i could use it for lines here i’m going to insert an arrow and i’m going to press the shift key again and this ensures that i have a perfectly straight line if i didn’t use shift it’d be a little hard to align it now if i press shift and i go up it’ll move in 45 degree increments and give me a line so here this way i can get nice clean lines on my slide this is tip number two tip number three i want to show you how you could insert a countdown timer into your powerpoint presentation oftentimes you’re presenting in front of a group and maybe you want to take a short break and you want to let your audience know how much time they have luckily it’s very easy to insert a countdown timer into powerpoint within powerpoint go up to the ribbon and click on insert and then we’re going to go over to the add-ins section and we’re going to click on get add-ins within the office add-ins prompt let’s click on search and we’re going to type in timer and then search this shows you a number of different timers that you can insert into your powerpoint presentation i personally like the break time timer i’m going to click on add for that next it’ll ask me to agree to the license terms and privacy policy i’m going to click on continue next this inserts a countdown timer into my slide i could position it however i want it to appear i can set how much time i want the countdown timer to be for here by default it’s set to 10 minutes and zero seconds and i can even choose a background that i want to apply i’m going to select reading next i’m going to click on start and we can see what the breakdown timer looks like so this is a cool neat little tool that you could implement into your slide to have a timer tip number four you can record your desktop or your screen using microsoft powerpoint to record your screen go up to the top ribbon click on insert and all the way over on the right hand side you’ll see an option for screen recording if we click on this this will drop me on the desktop and i could select the area of my desktop that i want to record i’m simply going to select the entire screen and then i’m going to click on record it shows me the shortcut key that i could press windows logo shift and q to stop the recording or i could hover up above to stop the recording this way as well so now i can click on an item on my desktop here’s a nice picture of time square and now i’m going to press windows logo shift and q and that’ll stop the recording you now see that my screen recording is inserted into microsoft powerpoint now i’m not just limited to using the screen recording within powerpoint i could right click on it and i could also save this screen recording as an mp4 if i want to use this elsewhere so pretty awesome functionality built directly into powerpoint next i want to show you how you can merge shapes on this slide i have two different shapes i have both a circle and a square i’m going to pull my square and i’m going to position this over my circle and i’m going to put it right about there next i’m going to select both of these shapes and because i have shapes selected i see the shape format option on my ribbon let’s click into that now over on the left hand side because i have multiple shapes selected i have the option to merge shapes when i click on this there are many different ways that i can merge these shapes for instance i can do a union where i bring them together into one shape i can also do a combine where it leaves out the intersecting portion of it i could also do a fragment where it creates three separate shapes here i could do an intersect where it just keeps the intersecting portion and the last one is to subtract the second shape from the first one i’m going to go with fragments to see how this works now that i’ve done fragment i have three different shapes i’m going to remove this portion for now and i’m going to delete that next i’m going to pull out this portion of my circle this could be a neat technique say for example in a presentation that i have this pie that maybe represents all of our sales and i want to have a point out at this portion of the circle calling out what happened with this portion of our sales you could do lots of neat things with merging shapes tip number six microsoft powerpoint has a whole bunch of different stock images that you can insert into your presentation to insert stock images simply go up to the top ribbon click on insert and then click on pictures and then within pictures there’s an option for stock images when you click on this you have a massive variety of stock images that you can bring into your presentation you could search for images you could click on categories or you could simply click on an individual image along with clicking on an image you can also insert icons cut out people stickers and illustrations i’m satisfied with my selection i’ll go ahead and insert this here you see a very high resolution photo is inserted onto my slide tip number seven did you know that you can remove the background from a photo here i have a beautiful picture of a hot air balloon and i want to remove the background sky i’m going to select the photo and i have the picture format option on the ribbon when i click on that over on the left hand side i have the option to remove the background i’m going to click on that this now does its best job at removing all the background but i see that it hasn’t quite removed everything if i go to the ribbon i could click on mark areas to remove and then i could highlight the section of the image that i wanted to remove here i’ll click over here and that removes that background as well now you can see there’s a little bit of background left behind the bucket of the hot air balloon so i’m just going to click in there to remove that as well once i’m satisfied with all the results i can click on keep changes and that’s now removed the background from my hot air balloon tip number eight i want to show how you can align objects on your slide like a pro to align these objects first off let’s highlight all of these squares once we have them highlighted let’s go up to the top ribbon and click on shape format over on the right hand side we have the option to align i’m going to click on a line and first off i want to top align all of these shapes let’s click on that first now i see all of the items are top aligned i’m going to click on align again and i want to distribute horizontally to remove these big gaps between the items and here now you can see that they’re all top aligned and the spacing between each item is identical this now looks very nice and i was able to effectively align my objects tip number nine i want to show you how you can use the selection pane and work more effectively with layers you see that i have three different circles on my slide i have a blue circle at the bottom layer then a red circle in the middle layer and my yellow circle is on the top layer to move these different items between layers you could simply right click on them and you could send it all the way to the back or you could simply send it one layer back now this could take time especially if you want to modify lots of different items on lots of different layers to work with this more effectively let’s go to the home tab on the ribbon and then over on the right hand side click on select within the selection menu there’s an option called selection pane let’s click on that this opens up the selection pane and i see all of the different objects that i have on this slide for instance if i click on oval 5 it turns out that’s the yellow circle if i double click i could rename this object i could go through now and i could rename all the objects on the slide to make it easier to know which item is on which layer i’ve now renamed all of the different objects within the selection pane so now i very quickly and easily know which object is which item here i could hide items within here let’s say i want to hide the yellow circle so maybe i could work on the red circle in the blue circle and then i could show the yellow circle again now to move items between layers whatever item appears at the top of the list is on the topmost layer i could click on this item and i could bring the yellow circle to the bottom or maybe i want to move the red circle down i could very easily do that by dragging and dropping items within the selection pane tip number 10 i want to show you how you can use the eyedropper together with snip and sketch to be able to copy any color that appears on your desktop i have a rectangle in the middle of my slide and it says powerpoint but this isn’t the powerpoint brand color i see the brand color up here on the top app bar how do i get this color into the rectangle well first we’re going to use the snip and sketch tool this comes with windows 10. to launch snip and sketch we’re going to press the windows logo key together with shift and s at the same time this launches the snip and sketch tool and i’m going to go up here and select a rectangular snip now i’m going to draw a rectangle around the top app color i see now that this color is on my clipboard next i’m going to click into powerpoint and i’m going to press ctrl v to paste this onto my slide this pastes the app color onto my slide next i want to take this color and get it into my rectangle i’m going to click on the rectangle and go to the top bar to shape format within shape format i’m going to click on shape fill go down to the eyedropper tool and i’m going to select the color from this rectangle this now applies the same exact color from the top bar to this rectangle tip number 11 i want to show you how you can copy objects using the ctrl key i have a rectangle on the slide and i currently have it selected if i press the ctrl key and then click on the object and drag it over this will give me a copy of the object i could also select multiple items so here i could highlight both items and i could press ctrl and then drag down and that will give me two copies of the item i could also select all four of these press control and now i have a whole bunch of copies of the original rectangle tip number 12 did you know that you can narrate powerpoint slides together with your voice and also video to narrate a slide let’s go up to slideshow on the top ribbon and then there’s an option to record a slideshow we could record from the current slide or from the beginning i’m going to click on record from current slide this opens up the record interface i could click on record i could also go through and i could annotate my screen let’s click on record to see how this works i’m going to click on record i see a countdown message and hey we are on the air here i’m going to annotate the slide maybe i’ll insert a different color and this sounds great once i’m all done i’m going to click on the stop button on top next i’m going to click on the x in the top right hand corner and now this inserts my video and my annotation on the slide if i jump into presentation mode you’ll see the slide come up with my annotations and the video will play number 13 when you’re presenting in microsoft powerpoint there are all sorts of shortcut keys that you could use in presentation mode first off let’s jump into presentation mode if you press the f1 key this will show you all of the different shortcuts that you can use when you’re presenting in powerpoint there are quite a few different shortcut keys here you can take a look through these and see which ones will be the most valuable to you for instance a few of the things i could do if i press b it’ll change the slide to black i can press w to change the slide to white i could also press ctrl p and that’ll bring up a pen tool and i can then annotate the screen i could even bring up a highlighter i could bring up a laser pointer there are all these different tools that i have while i’m presenting tip number 14 i want to show you how you could take a boring slide like this and make it a lot more exciting by using design ideas to use design ideas click on home on the top ribbon and then over on the far right hand side you see an option for designer or design ideas let’s click on this this now shows me a whole bunch of design ideas on the right hand side these are constantly evolving and they’re constantly getting better now i’m going to click on this first one and let’s see how this works here it formats my slide in a much more aesthetically pleasing way now one of the things that’s really neat too and i don’t know if you noticed this but here the text says who will read this and here you see a picture of a book i don’t think anyone will the word think is in there and i see a little cloud that typically goes along with thinking and then please stop reading and you see a stack of books so all of these icons are chosen based on what the text is so it’s it’s in a very smart way identifying what type of content should show up design ideas helps you create better slides tip number 15 i want to show you some advanced ways that you can crop a photo when i click on a photo up on the top tabs an option appears for picture format when i click on this i could crop a photo over on the right hand side if i click on crop by default it allows me to crop the photo as a rectangle however let’s say i want to apply different cropping to this photo i could click on this drop down and maybe i want to first off crop to an aspect ratio i could crop it to one by one i could reposition the photo within here to crop it within this aspect ratio i’m going to expand the photo a little bit and i’ll place this picture of my sun right in the middle next i can go up to the crop tool and now i can crop to a shape i’m going to go in and i’m going to crop this to a circle now you see some pretty creative cropping where i’ve cropped my sun to be in this perfect circle here all right that was a quick look at 15 of my favorite tips and tricks in microsoft powerpoint in the comments down below let me know if there are others that you use that you would recommend that others take a look at or also let me know if any of these tips and tricks are ones that you personally use if you enjoyed this video please give it a thumbs up if you want to see more videos like this in the future make sure to hit that subscribe button lastly if you want to see me cover any other topics in the future leave a note down below and i’ll add it to my list of videos to create alright that’s all i had for you today i hope you enjoyed and i hope to see you next time bye you