PowerPoint 2010 cheat sheet

Five tips for working with PowerPoint 2010

With the introduction of the Ribbon in 2007, many familiar ways of interacting with PowerPoint became hard to find while powerful new tools cropped up. These tips will help you get the most out of PowerPoint 2010 -- and locate your old favorite commands.

1. Turn your mouse into a laser pointer

As you're giving a presentation, you can make your cursor appear as a glowing red dot for a laser pointer effect. When you're in Slide Show view (it's the fourth icon in the View toolbar at the bottom right of the screen), hold down the Ctrl key, then click and hold the left mouse button. Keep the Ctrl key depressed for as long as you want the cursor to appear as a red dot. When you let go, your cursor will change back to its normal arrow shape.

2. Add commands to the Quick Access toolbar

By letting you customize the Ribbon, PowerPoint 2010 has gotten a lot more flexible than PowerPoint 2007. But it can still be helpful to customize the Quick Access toolbar for one-click access to your most frequently used commands, no matter which Ribbon tab is showing.

A quick way to do it is to click the small down arrow to the right on the Quick Access toolbar and choose More Commands.

From the left-hand side of the screen that appears, choose commands that you want to add to the toolbar and click Add. You can change the order in which the buttons appear on the toolbar by highlighting a button on the right side of the screen and using the up and down arrows to move it.

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The list of commands you see on the left may seem somewhat limited at first. That's because PowerPoint is showing you only the most popular commands. Click the drop-down menu under "Choose commands from" at the top of the screen, and you'll see other lists of commands -- All Commands, Home Tab and so on. Select any option, and there will be plenty of commands you can add.

Finally, there's an even easier way to add a command. Right-click any object on the Ribbon and choose "Add to Quick Access Toolbar." You can add not only individual commands in this way, but also entire groups -- for example, the Advanced Animation group.

3. Hide the Ribbon

Ribbon taking up too much screen space? You can temporarily turn it off. Doing this will get you back plenty of screen real estate.

To hide the Ribbon, you can either press Ctrl-F1 (and press Ctrl-F1 again to make the Ribbon reappear) or just right-click anywhere in the Ribbon and select "Minimize the Ribbon." You can also click the small up arrow at the far upper right of the Ribbon to hide it. The arrow turns into a down arrow, which when clicked upon makes the Ribbon appear again.

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The Ribbon will still be available when you want it -- all you need to do is click on the appropriate tab (Home, Insert, Design, etc.) and it appears. It then discreetly goes away when you are no longer using it.

4. Find your old friends

If you've been using PowerPoint 2007, you've probably found most of the features and functions you used in earlier versions of PowerPoint. But if you're upgrading directly to PowerPoint from PowerPoint or earlier, you may have a harder time locating many of your favorite commands.

Use our for an extensive list of where to find your old friends in the newest version of PowerPoint. To save you more time, we've also included keyboard shortcuts for all these commands.

5. Use keyboard shortcuts

If you've been using keyboard shortcuts in PowerPoint 2007, PowerPoint 2003 or earlier versions, take heart -- most of the same ones work in PowerPoint 2010. Any shortcuts that use the Ctrl key, such as Ctrl-C for copying to the clipboard and Ctrl-V for pasting, still work.

Most of the old Alt-key shortcuts work as well, although not every one of them. See the table at the bottom of the page for the most useful shortcuts in PowerPoint.

You can also use a clever set of keyboard shortcuts for working with the Ribbon. (These are unchanged from PowerPoint 2007.) Press the Alt key, and then a tiny letter or number icon will appear on the menu for each tab -- for example, the letter H for the Home tab. Now press that letter on your keyboard, and you'll display that tab or menu item. When the tab appears, there will be letters and numbers for most options on the tab as well.

Once you've started to learn these shortcuts, you'll naturally begin using key combinations. So instead of pressing Alt then H to display the home tab, you can press Alt-H together.

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For more nifty keyboard shortcuts, see the table below. And even more shortcuts for creating and giving presentations in PowerPoint 2010 are listed on Microsoft's Office 2010 site.

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