In this video, I'm going to
share five PowerPoint features that can really make a difference for you. Even if you've been using
PowerPoint for some time, you'll probably find something new here. (soft music) First, a brief thanks to simple slides for sponsoring today's video. These guys create some of the
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out when you're ready. Now, let's get started and
let me know in the comments, which of these tips were new to you. Number one, Add Action To Your Slides. Action Buttons are an
often overlooked feature in PowerPoint. These are built in shapes that can perform an action
in your presentation like running an app or a
macro or play an audio clip. But by far, the best use for me is the ability to use it like a hyperlink to jump to a specific
slide in the presentation. It adds interactivity to my presentation. Let me show you how. Here we have a slide with
a map for North America, and then I have additional slides for USA, Canada, and Mexico. What I want to do is to be able to click on a button for, let's say the U.S., and jump to that particular detail slide. We can use Action Buttons for that. Just go to Insert, Shapes
and all the way at the bottom you're going to see Action Buttons. There are some already available to select but I don't like their design and I'd rather create a custom shape. So I'll just go to the blank one here and I'll draw out a rectangle. In the window that's popping up, we get to program the button. There are two tabs up here,
Mouse Click and Mouse Over. Meaning, if the Action Button
should file when we click, or already by just hovering
over it with a mouse. In our case, we want a clickable button. The action should be a hyperlink, and with the dropdown here,
we get several choices. We want to select a specific slide. So let's select Slide. We want to jump to the map for the U.S., so we select Slide 2 and hit okay. Let's quickly test it. Open the Slide Show, and here's my button. When I click it, it jumps
to the slide for the U.S.. That's how easy this is. But let's not stop here, let's
quickly improve the design. When you click on the button
and go to Shape Format, you can edit the shape. With this dropdown, you
can change the shape of the Action Button to
basically any shape you want. In my case, I want to circle. Let's draw it out. Then let's get rid of the outline and make the fill the same as on the map. The easiest for that is to
use the Eyedropper tool. That's it. It looks good. Let's quickly test it. Slide Show, let's click on the button and
it jumps to the right slide. I recommend you also create an Action Button under detail slide so that you can easily
jump back to your overview. It makes it easy to navigate
in the presentation. Action Buttons can be a great
addition to your presentation. Board presentation is often
consists of a main slide deck and then they have backup slides. With Action Buttons, you can
easily jump back and forth without having to leave the slideshow. Give it a try, you're going to love it. Number two, Go Light On Pictures. I'm a big fan of using supporting pictures or infographics to convey
a message in a slide. But using high resolution pictures or even videos can explode
the size of your presentation. It's going to make your presentation slow, and if you have to send
your presentation that runs in an email, you're not
going to make many friends. Here's what you should do instead. Let's take this
presentation, for instance. It's got some nice pictures and graphics, but check out the file size, is over 40 megabytes, way
too big for two slides. Let's try to reduce it. If you click on a picture, you get this additional
tab, Picture Format. Here, you're going to
find Compress Pictures. Under Resolution, you can
see the different options. Right now it's set to high fidelity, which reminds me of John Cusick, but here it means maximum resolution. Let's go with three 30 ppi, which is still a high
resolution, and uncheck the box, apply only to this picture up here so that we can apply to
select as compression to all the pictures in the presentation. Let's save and see what we get. This brought it down to 1.7 megabytes. In my experience, you
can go down to 220 ppi and you'll still be okay on most screens. Play around with it and
see what works for you. So, unless you need maximum
resolution for some reason, always compress your pictures. Number three, Remove That Background. PowerPoint has a great feature you can use to quickly remove the
background from a picture. Let's say we have this picture here and we want to remove the background. When you click on it, the tab, Picture Format
is going to appear. On this tab, the first option on the
left is Removed Background. When you click it, PowerPoint will analyze the
picture and it's going to mark all areas it considers
background in purple. They usually does a pretty good job but it will probably miss some
areas or take away too much. In this case, we can
use the buttons up here to mark areas to keep or areas to remove. I'll have to work some areas here to keep. So I'll just mark this part
and let's do these parts too. When you're done, just
click, Keep Changes. That's it. The background is gone, and you can use the image
in your presentation. Pretty easy, right? It's not Photoshop quality,
but if you have to get something done quickly
for a representation, it's a good choice. Number four, The Secret Selection Pane. Sometimes slides can get complex with lots of shapes on top of one another. That's where the Selection Pane comes in. It lets you isolate shapes on the slide. Let me show you how. So, let's say we want to color these dots in the same color as the bars, but because they're behind the line, they're difficult to select. That's when you can
use the Selection Pane. If you like shortcuts, you can use Alt + F10 to bring it up, or just select any shape and
then go to Shape Format tab, and under Arrange you'll
see Selection Pane. Once selected, a new window pops up here. The great thing about this view is that you can isolate objects. Just click on the element and it will be selected on the slide. With the eye icon here, we can show or hide objects on the slide. This makes it easy to work on shapes that are hidden in the background. So, in this case, the bold
dots that we want to change are these items called Oval. With a double click, I
can also change the name so I can find it easier later on. In the Selection Pane,
I select the first dot, and to change its color, I
go to Shape Fill up here. Let's use the Eyedropper tool
to get the matching color. That looks good. But it's still behind the gray line, which is called Line 22. To bring the dot further to the front, on top of the gray line,
I select the object and either use the up-down arrow here or I simply drag it like this. Okay, that looks good. It's just one of these
things in PowerPoint that's easy to miss, but can
make your life so much easier. Number five, Record Your Screen. If you need to quickly record your screen to demonstrate something to a colleague, you can use PowerPoint's
built-in Screen Recorder. So, for simple screencasts, you don't even need any
additional software. From the Insert tab,
select Screen Recording. This is going to bring
up the control doc here. The main thing you need to do is to select the area of your
screen you want to record. Just click and drag to select the area. If you want to record the entire screen you can also use the
shortcut, Windows + Shift + F. By default, PowerPoint will
record audio and your cursor but you can turn this on and
off with these selections here. When you're ready, click the record button which will start a three second countdown before the recording starts. Then just perform the steps you want to have in your screencast. To stop the recording, use the
shortcut Windows + Shift + Q, or move the mouse to the top until the control doc pops
up again and then click stop. That's how simple it is to record your screen with PowerPoint. But that's not all, now that you created your screencast, you can also apply some customization. So on the tab, Video
Format, under Corrections, go to Video Corrections options. This way you can play around
with brightness and contrast, or select a preset from the dropdown here and even recolor the entire recording. To get back to the original,
click Reset down here. Similar to images, you can
also crop the screencast. Just select Crop and use the handles to get rid of areas you don't
need in your screencast. The other cool thing is that
you can also use some presets from the video effects to get
some fancy looking 3D effect to frame the video. So in your slideshow, the
hits would look like this. In the playback tab, you have
some video editing features. They're quite basic, but
you can trim the video and delete some parts in
the beginning and the end. So basically parts that you don't need. Everything outside of these
handles will be deleted. You can't cut out anything
in the middle though. You can also some Fade
In and Fade Out effect, but that's it in terms of editing. So if you need some basic screencast tool, PowerPoint's built-in solution
can definitely do the trick. And by using the Export functionality, you can even get your
screencast in MP4 video format, which you can share or publish online. As you can see with
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Is In The Description of this video. That's it for today. I hope these tips will be helpful for you when creating PowerPoint presentations. If you enjoyed the video,
please give it a thumbs up, and if you want to improve your
skills consider subscribing. And don't forget to hit that bell so you don't miss out on any new videos. Thank you for watching and I'm going to see
you in the next video. (upbeat music)
