No matter how good a PowerPointer you are and no matter how often you work in PowerPoint, you're bound to miss a feature that other users consider essential. 

Last week we asked you to share your favorite PowerPoint features – and you did! From picture styles, shape effects and animations to customizing and production efficiencies – you definitely covered the "must know" features!

Below is a summary of your favorite features along with links to their screencasts. If you have additional features or know of screencasts that support this list, please add them to the comments and we'll update the list.

Click to view Essential PowerPoint Features 

Design Effects

Photo Effects:

Drop Shadows:

Remove Backgrounds:

Combining shapes:

Animations

Transitions:

Animation Painter

Video and multimedia

Saving Presentations as movies:

PowerPoint 2010 Video:

Production Efficiencies

Screenshots:

Change Pictures:

Selection Pane:

Mathematical Equations:

Customizing

Slide Masters:

Customize menu bar:

Image and Text Placeholders:

Resources

 

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21 Comments
David Anderson
Edward Springer
Jonathan Workman
Amanda Hoynes
Rob Nachum

That really is a great resource! Sorry i missed the input stage. For what it's worth, my current favourite is cut, right click paste special, image. When we convert slides with tonnes of text (public companies with safe harbor / disclaimer statements of 30 lines of 6pt text) it [rightly] takes ages for Articulate to render through each of the characters. So converting the slide to an image greatly accelerated the conversion process. Before being taught the above tip at [plug] http://www.betterpresenting.com/summit/ we would shift f5, alt print screen, escape, paste, format pic, crop, resize..... With the above tip it is now just ctrl-a(ll), ctl-x, right click paste image. This might not sound like such a big deal, but when you are processing a 50 presentations a day at a con... Expand