10 PowerPoint Features to Transform Your Presentations

There are many features available in PowerPoint that can help you create better presentations and become a better presenter. It’s always a good idea to make the best use of PowerPoint, and use all the features it has to provide, if you want to transform your Presentations.

In this blog, we’ll talk about some of the latest and most important features of PowerPoint.  These features will surely help you in standing out from the rest!

Attractive PowerPoint Features To Give Better Presentation

Here are some of the best features to make your presentation top notch!

1. Presenter Coach

Presenter coach is a great PowerPoint feature. It is named ‘Rehearse with Coach‘ in PowerPoint. The tool enables you to practise your presentation. If you are moving too quickly or slowly, rehearsing with a coach will let you know. It also notifies you if you accidently use filler words such as ‘uh,’ ‘um,’ ‘like’, ‘oh’, ‘ah’, etc. in your presentation.

Additionally, it alerts you if you use offensive language, sensitive words, or if you are reading from slides. Presenter coach works with PowerPoint for Microsoft 365, PowerPoint for Mac, PowerPoint for the web, PowerPoint for iPad, and PowerPoint for Android tablets.

2. Cameo

You can place your live camera feed straight on a PowerPoint slide using the cameo feature. The formatting, transitions, and styles that you can apply to a photograph or other item can also be applied to your camera feed. It will also provide layout suggestions for the best viewing, and you can adjust how and where you would like to present on your slides. 

Similar to other Office graphical objects like Pictures, Gifs, and Shapes, Cameo also offers all personalization features. This entails adding motion effects, such as morph, shifting styles and forms, and layering Cameo between pieces of information.

Microsoft 365 subscribers can access Cameo features through the desktop app on Windows or macOS.

3. Subtitles

Do you prefer watching movies with subtitles? Subtitles make it easier to understand what the character is saying. 

Similar to this, you can include subtitles or closed captions for videos and audio recordings in your presentations using PowerPoint. This feature is available for Windows and macOS users.

You can easily find stored closed captions under the text-based file called a.vtt. You can also use a caption creation tool to make your own custom made closed caption file.

Subtitles are also very useful for people with hearing impairments. and for those who speak a different language other than the one in your video will be able to access your presentation.

4. Pointing and Highlighting tools

We all know the importance of a digital pencil on tablets. It helps us to highlight a particular spot we want to highlight. 

Similarly, in powerpoint there is also a similar tool. This function is offered by PowerPoint for the web in your browser and is accessible on both Windows and macOS.

It can transform your static presentation into a whiteboard where you can scribble and draw.

And, if for some reason you can’t seem to access this tool, worry not! You simply need to go to the ‘Home Tab’ and select the text using your cursor. After that, select the desired colour from the dropdown menu by clicking the highlight text button in the font section.

5. Presenter View

When you present your slides to the audience, you would want every tool to be on your tips. Luckily, PowerPoint has many tools in its toolbar. To access these tools such as a presenter notes or laser pointer, check out the Presenter View.

To use the presenter view feature on Windows, visit the ‘Slide Show‘ tab. Then, in the monitors section, choose the presenter view option. Then, begin your presentation normally.

Whereas, on Mac, just click on the presenter view option on the slide show tab.

To begin the presenter view at the time of slideshow, tap the three dots present on the bottom left. Then pick the ‘Show Presenter’s View‘

Next, you will see a screen ( which looks like a dashboard) with everything that you need. There on the top left side is the current slide, and the next slide is right next to it. Below all of this are notes.

On the left side, you can use various other features. You can open additional tools, turn subtitles on and off, toggle the camera. Then, end the slide show.

Presenter view is one of the best features of PowerPoint where you have everything you need at your fingertips.

6. Zoom

When you think of a perfect PowerPoint presentation,how does it look? Smooth, right?

You begin with one slide and then you click on the next and then next. The slides move easily and smoothly. All the slides are in row but it is very easy to lose sight of how all the information fits together perfectly.

This is the time where the Zoom feature of PowerPoint comes into play. We can say, it is a visual table of content.

You can select which slides you want to feature. Then the tool will automatically produce a slide that can serve as a menu of all the other slides.

On the menu slide which you’ve selected, the presenter can zoom in on various portions of the presentation and jump to that particular section.

Not only does this feature look cool, but also it empowers the presenter to display the context and theme of the slideshow. Instead of clicking every time.

7. Speaker Notes

Speaker notes in the PowerPoint presentation are very crucial. You can include all the relevant information, main points and other details in these speaker notes.

To insert speaker notes in your slides, open the notes panel. You can either choose the ‘Notes’ option in the status bar. Or you can drag the notes from the bottom of the slide.

Then, at the time of presenting your slides, make sure to use the presenter view to show the notes at the time of slide show.

Also, a new update came this year 2022, where you can also edit your speaker notes at the time of presenting. This is really a good way to grab the additional points that jumps in your mind at the time of presenting.

Then, keep your cursor in the notes area on the right hand side and insert or remove the text. Also, other than this, you can add buttons at the bottom to decrease or increase the size of the font.

To deliver a successful presentation, having speaker notes is very very important.

8. Layouts to Declutter Slides

Cluttered slide layouts are too basic in many PowerPoint presentations. Sometimes, you have to put a lot of information on a slide only.

But it’s the one bad habit which you must avoid.

The best option is to use the layout option of PowerPoint. It is a drop down menu which is found on the Home Tab.

PowerPoint layouts contain a lot of layouts. You will see a wide range of slide layouts. Also, some of them have extra space for other content and images.

This is a very subtle, but an effective way to declutter your PowerPoint slides. This feature helps you in giving a neater & cleaner layout which you can apply in just a click.

Conclusion

The blog was all about the ways to make your  PowerPoint presentation top notch. Using these standard and attractive features, you can easily make your PowerPoint presentation perfect in every way!