Whether you’re a teacher planning a lesson, a business leader presenting a quarterly report, or a marketer designing eye-catching content, making a PowerPoint presentation can often eat up too much of your valuable time. Luckily, there are many ways to speed up this process.

1
Use the Slide Master to Make Wholesale Changes

PowerPoint’s slide master lets you control your presentation’s overall design by changing fonts, images, colors, backgrounds, bullet styles, and anything else that appears on all slides or certain slides of the same style. Since making changes to the slide master affects multiple slides, it’s a surefire way to not only save time but also ensure consistency.

To view and edit the slide master, click “Slide Master” in the view tab on the ribbon.

The slide at the top of the thumbnail pane is the master slide, meaning any changes you make to this slide will appear on all slides in your presentation. In this example, as soon as I selected the master slide and changed the title placeholder font to red with yellow highlighting, the other slides adopted this formatting.

On the other hand, if you want to change the layout of certain types of slides, like those with two content boxes side by side, scroll to the relevant layout in the thumbnail pane and make the desired changes.

When you’ve finished making changes in the slide master, click “Close Master View” in the Slide Master tab (or click “Normal” in the View tab).

2
Add Commands to the Quick Access Toolbar

As its name suggests, the Quick Access Toolbar (QAT)—which is also available on the desktop versions of other Microsoft programs like Word and Excel—is a place where you can add buttons to commands that you perform often, saving you from having to trawl through PowerPoint’s many tabs and menus.

For example, my QAT contains icons that let me insert a text box, format text to bullet points, align objects in the center of a slide, and perform other frequently-used PowerPoint commands.

By default, the QAT sits at the very top of the PowerPoint window and contains often-used icons like Save and AutoSave. If you can’t see it, you need to activate it by right-clicking anywhere on the ribbon, and clicking “Show Quick Access Toolbar.”

You’re now ready to add commands to the QAT, and there are three ways to do this. The first (and quickest) way is to right-click a command within one of the tabs, and click “Add To Quick Access Toolbar.” In this example, I want to add the Comments button to my QAT.

Just bear in mind that not all individual buttons can be added. For example, if you right-click the button that inserts a triangle shape on a slide, you’ll only see the option to add the Shapes gallery to the QAT.

The second way to add buttons to the QAT is to choose from the suggested options in the “Customize Quick Access Toolbar” drop-down list to the right of the QAT. Actions with a check mark have already been added to the QAT.

Finally, if you can’t find a command using either of those two methods, click the “Customize Quick Access Toolbar” drop-down arrow again, but this time, select “More Commands.”

Then, in the left-hand drop-down menu of the PowerPoint Options dialog box, click “All Commands,” and when you find the action you want to add to the QAT, click “Add.” After selecting a command in the right-hand menu and using the arrows to reposition the order of the icons on your QAT, click “OK.”

3
Group Connected Items to Maintain Proportions

One of the buttons on my QAT is the Group Items icon, because it saves me so much time whenever I create a PowerPoint presentation.

Let’s say you have a seating plan on one of your slides, but you want to change the positions and sizes of all the tables and chairs at the same time, all while keeping their relative proportions the same. Instead of adjusting them individually, you can either hold Ctrl while selecting them one by one or, better still, use the Select cursor to select them all together.

Now, in the Home tab on the ribbon, click “Arrange,” and then click “Group.”

You’ve now told PowerPoint that even though these shapes are individual items, they’re related to each other. This means that when you select one object, they’ll all be selected together, so you can move, resize, or format them consistently, or even animate them together if you wish.

In this example, after selecting the grouped items, I resized them simultaneously, changed the font to Times New Roman, and moved them down in the slide so that I could add a slide title.

4
Use PowerPoint Templates

PowerPoint templates are pre-designed presentation layouts containing fonts, colors, and different types of slide layouts already prepared for you to use. They even have placeholder content to give you an idea of the type of details each layout might contain.

As well as saving you the time it would have taken to design your slides from scratch, PowerPoint templates look professional and ensure consistency throughout a presentation.

To make the best use of PowerPoint templates, choose one before you begin adding content. When you first open the program, click “New” in the left-hand menu on the welcome page, and start by browsing the selection at the bottom of your screen. However, if none of those options tickle your fancy, use the search box to find more templates and themes.

When you’ve settled on a design you like, double-click it, and PowerPoint will open the template as a new, editable presentation. Remember to save the file before you begin making changes.

5
Make the Most of the AI Designer Tool

PowerPoint’s Designer tool uses AI to suggest high-quality slide layouts based on your content, saving you from having to think about how you can make your presentation more professional and eye-catching. As you add text or images to your slides, Designer automatically and intuitively produces layouts for you to choose from.

In this example, I typed “Grow Your Own Food” into a blank title slide. Then, when I clicked “Designer” in the Design tab, the pane on the right produced several excellent options for me to choose from.

Then, when I typed the sub-heading “Become a Sustainable Gardener,” the choices in the Designer pane reloaded to account for my additional content.

You don’t need to start with a blank canvas. For example, even if you’re using a PowerPoint template (see the section above), Designer is still ready to suggest AI-generated layouts based on what your slides already contain.

Another way to improve your workflow efficiency is to optimize the PowerPoint file itself. For example, reducing the file size, removing macros and add-ins, and disabling AutoSave will help you ensure your presentation doesn’t let you down when you come to deliver it to your audience.