Powerpoint and keyboard shortcuts
Small update below (the powerpoint user interface is even more hideous than I thought) Am I missing something glaringly obvious in Powerpoint? (Yes, I have to use Powerpoint, don’t ask.) As far as I can see, you can do pretty much anything with keyboard shortcuts in Powerpoint:
- Change to Italics (⌘I) or Bold (⌘B)
- Change the font-size (Shift-⌘< and Shift-⌘>)
- Change the indentation level (Shift-⌥→ and Shift-⌥←)
- Insert a new slide (^M)
- Switch between slides (page-up and page-down)
- Switch between slide input and notes input (F6)
With the above things you can pretty much create a whole presentation completely using the keyboard. But there’s one very basic thing that compels you to use the mouse: there is no way to switch between the title text box and the main body text box!
I have searched and searched, but to no avail. Please LazyWeb, tell me that there is such a keyboard shortcut…
Update: A reader commented that in outline view, you can use the tab key to get from the title to the body of a slide. When I tried to test this, I found some really horrible usability problems.
First of all, there is only one way to get to the outline view, using the small button on the bottom-left of the window. It’s not listed in the “View” menu and if you switch to outline view, the “view” menu looks odd, because there is no checkmark next to the current view.
When I did get to the outline view, I tested the Tab key shortcut and the behavior of the tab key is really odd: If you’re on a line, it will indent the line like Shift-⌥→ and Shift-⌥←. However, if you are on a Title line, it will indent that line and move that line to the body of the previous slide!.
So yes, it does allow you to go from the title to the body of a slide, but to do so you need to create a new slide, enter the title of that slide, create another slide, type a line and press tab. But somehow I don’t think that this is the intended or recommended way to do this.