Saturday 9 July 2016

PowerPoint- Name those Slides

Someone once advised me to make a list of the slide numbers of the slides in my presentation and their subject matter so that, if someone asked me a question, I could easily refer back to that particular slide. Hmm, I thought, nice idea but wouldn't it be better to name them, then I could name my slide, say "New Ideas" rather than have to remember that it was Slide 4 in the deck. And, of course, I could use these names in hyperlinks.

Naming PowerPoint Slides

You may find that your slides are already named, especially if you have planned your presentation in the outline view as you are supposed to according to the "Way of PowerPoint". Any slide that has a Title text placeholder uses the text in the text box to name the slide. Every PowerPoint slide has a name property but there is no other way of setting it other than to use the title text placeholder. 

The reality is that most presentations do not get planned in the outline view, they tend to come together more organically and are often composed from blank or duplicated slides. The first thing is to determine if your slides are named, there's many different ways of doing this. My favourite method is to run the slide show and view the slide names in the way that I intend to use them.

Viewing the Slide names
To do this press F5 and then click the controls at the lower left hand corner of the screen to view the slide names. 

It's fantastic news for this presentation as we can see that all the slides are named so we will not have any problem identifying which slide is which and can easily jump around in our presentation.

This is usually not the case and you will probably find that some of the slides are named but many are not so you will have to go through the naming process, which is done in the Outline view and then the moving/hiding process which is done either in normal or outline view.


Outline View

For PowerPoint 2010, click on the Outline tab on the left hand side of the normal view to switch the normal display of thumbnails to an outline of your presentation. Each icon on the left represents a slide. In PowerPoint 2013 and later the Outline pane has to be turned on by clicking the Outline View control in the Presentation Views group on the View tab.

Outline view
Looking at the list of slides in the outline pane you will be able to see which slides have not been named. They were probably blank slides inserted into the presentation.

Click to the right of the icon and type in some text to name the slide. You can rename existing slides if you wish but remember that you are changing the text that is displayed on the slide.

You must have some title text on your slide but if you don't want to see it you can always hide it or move it off the presentation frame so that it does not display.

Having named your slides you can return to the normal view by clicking the Slides tab if you prefer to work in this more familiar Powerpoint view.


Moving or Hiding the Title Text

As soon as you name your slide you will see a title text box appears on the slide which may disrupt the beauty of your slide and you might want to get rid of it. Don't delete the text box or you will return to having an un-named slide. Either format it to match the background, move it off the slide onto the grey background so that it does not display or hide it. I prefer to hide my ones.

Hiding the title text using the Selection and Visibility pane

To hide your title text, press Alt+F10 to turn on the Selection and Visibility Pane. There’s a control to turn this on and off on the Home tab but it’s easily missed. This pane lists all the objects on your slide and you can easily identify your title text as the object, "Title 1". Click the eye to the right to hide it.

If you have many other slide objects and maybe some complicated animations going on, it's probably a good idea to rename "Title 1" as "Name tag" or something to make it more obvious. To rename an object, click the current name in the pane and replace the text. 

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