You are giving a PowerPoint presentation and you are currently on slide 20. An audience member asks a question. To help clarify your response you would like to bring back the supporting data that appeared as part of slide 14. What will you do to display that visual once again?
You have a few possibilities.
- You could navigate back, one slide at a time, until you reach slide 14.
- You could press the Escape key (Esc) or the hyphen (-) and exit the slideshow; then go to the slide sorter, highlight slide 14, and re-launch the slideshow from there
- You could take no action and just say “remember when I had that information on the screen earlier?” and then hope the listener recalls what you covered
None of the above is the ideal solution. The fastest and most convenient way to navigate to any slide in a powerpoint presentation is to use the ENTER-ENTER method. Using the keyboard, ENTER the slide number and then press the ENTER key to display the slide. In this example, you would type 14 and then press enter to display slide 14.
Entering any number followed by the enter key will get you to that slide in your presentation. If you want to go back to the first slide, press 1 and enter; if you want to jump to the end of the presentation, just type 999 and press enter — unless, of course, you have 1,000 slides in your presentation!
Love this tip! I tried it and it works, and I plan to share it. It will really polish presenting by PPT.
The minor “trade-off” to this trick is that you will need access to the PC in order to enter the number on the keyboard.
However, even if you are on a stage, with the PC out of reach (perhaps it is at the back of the room, operated by a production crew member), you could simply instruct someone close enough to the PC to enter the number for you.