Streamline PowerPoint presentation edits at scale

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A well-crafted business presentation can make a world of difference – be it in winning a client deal or clearly communicating project updates to your team. But let’s face it: creating professional, engaging slides can be time-consuming.

This monthly LinkedIn newsletter is designed for professionals who want to create presentations that stand out and work smarter with PowerPoint and thinkcell. Whether you’re an experienced PowerPoint user or you’re just getting started in the world of business presentations, this newsletter will help you make slides that captivate your audience and influence decision-making.

Every month, we’ll share insights and tips that you can easily incorporate into your daily work and start building more impactful business presentations.

In this edition, we take a closer look at editing slides at scale, while being efficient with both your time and effort.

Enjoy the read!

Editing presentations faster with shortcuts

Anyone who has created PowerPoint presentations knows that speed is a virtue when it comes to delivering clear, meaningful presentations on time. When working with data-dense slides, it is often the smaller adjustments and formatting tasks that eat into your time. While the smaller formatting tasks cannot be left unaddressed, you can always make these edits more efficiently and at scale.

Each edit might only be a little drop of water on its own, but when you have to make the same changes over and over again, you can easily feel like you’re drowning. To help you stay afloat, we’ve put together some tips to help you work faster and make the smaller formatting tasks a little less unpleasant.

Mastering certain shortcuts to batch format elements of your charts will not only cut the friction from your workflows but keep your slides looking professional.

Multi-selecting objects and slides in PowerPoint

You probably know that PowerPoint supports familiar shortcuts like Ctrl+C, Ctrl+V, and the all-important Ctrl+Z. These are straightforward enough, but multi-selection shortcuts are more interesting, because their behavior depends on how and where they’re applied within the PowerPoint environment.

Multi-selection shortcuts aren’t complicated, but there’s nuance to them. Mastering the different ways to select multiple objects will increase your proficiency and have you building slides more quickly and precisely.

Selecting all

Your classic Ctrl+A for "select all" works in PowerPoint, but the meaning of "all" depends on which part of PowerPoint's user interface you're working with:

• If you're working in the slide thumbnail pane, then pressing Ctrl+A selects all the slides in your presentation. This can be useful for bulk edits like changing the background color of all your slides at once.
• If you're working somewhere on an actual slide, then Ctrl+A selects all the objects on that slide. You won’t often want to change the color of everything at once, but selecting all and then using Ctrl+click to deselect what you don’t want can be quicker than clicking on each object individually.
• If you're editing text inside a shape or text box, then Ctrl+A will select all the text in that object only, letting you adjust the text formatting. To keep your slides consistent, you will normally want to select multiple shapes and text boxes together and make bulk edits so that you don’t end up with varying fonts and font sizes.

While you can select all objects from the PowerPoint ribbon, on the Home tab, in the Editing group, select Select > Select All, simple keyboard shortcuts are always more efficient than navigating menus and repeatedly clicking mouse buttons.

Selecting specific slides

More often than not, you’ll want to make changes to some, but not all slides in your presentation, meaning you’ll want to select specific slides to edit. You have some options here:

• In the slide thumbnail pane, you can use Ctrl+click to select multiple slides or Shift+click to select a contiguous range of slides.
• If you have selected a slide in the slide thumbnail pane, you can use Shift+Arrow keys to quickly add slides that are adjacent to your selection.
• If your presentation has sections, you also have the option of selecting the section name to select and edit all slides in that section.
• For larger presentations, you can use the Slide Sorter, which you can access on the PowerPoint ribbon on the View tab. In the Slide Sorter view, you can use exactly the same shortcuts as in the slide thumbnail pane, but it gives you a much clearer overview of all your slides. This overview helps you easily select multiple slides, even if they aren’t near each other in your presentation’s flow.

Selecting specific objects on a slide

Selecting multiple objects is extremely common when adjusting formatting and alignment to make consistent, professional slide layouts. There are a few ways to select multiple objects:

• Click and drag to draw a frame around objects to select them together. To include an object in your selection, make sure that the object is completely within your selection frame.
• To select multiple individual objects, hold Ctrl and click the objects that you want. If you have multiple objects selected, you can also use Ctrl+click to remove an object from the selection. Note that to make edits, you have to release Ctrl before you right-click to open the shortcut menu. Otherwise, your multi-selection will be lost. In this specific context, Shift+click works in exactly the same way.
• If you work with the Selection pane, which you can access from the PowerPoint ribbon by selecting Home > Editing > Select, you can hold Ctrl and click the object names to select them. This can be useful if you are editing a busy slide with lots of overlapping objects that are hard to select with the mouse. Whenever you use the Selection pane, make your life easier by giving your objects meaningful names so that you can quickly identify them.

Multi-selecting elements with thinkcell

thinkcell helps you select multiple elements of your charts and update them all in one go. Not only does it reduce chances of errors, but it also ensures that the batch changes are consistent in styling and formatting.

Shift + Click

One way to use logical multi-selection of elements is by clicking on the first element, holding down the Shift key, and clicking on the last element in the range you want to select. This way, you can select a full range of elements, such as the entire series.

Ctrl + A

Another way to multi-select a group of elements is to left-click on one of the elements, say segment labels in a column chart, and select Ctrl+A to expand your selection to all the elements of the same type. By doing so, all the labels in that series are selected. By clicking Ctrl+A once again, you can expand your selection to all the labels in all the series.

Pressing Ctrl+A again further selects all series and category labels, basically expanding the selection to all the labels in the chart.

Ctrl + Click

If you want to select a few elements in the chart that aren’t related, for example, one series label and one total label, thinkcell helps you easily select these elements too. You can do so by holding down the Ctrl key and then selecting the specific elements you want to choose. Irrespective of whether they form a contiguous range or not, thinkcell helps you easily select these unrelated elements.

Ctrl + Alt + Shift + Arrow keys

You can extend the existing selection to include adjacent elements using the shortcut Ctrl+Alt+Shift and move the arrow key in any direction of your choice.

The path forward

In the upcoming editions, we’ll dive deeper into advanced PowerPoint techniques to streamline your presentations and share detailed thinkcell tutorials to help you create business presentations that matter.

Comment below and tell us what you’d like to see us cover in the upcoming editions of Behind the slides by thinkcell.

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