That Microsoft Office PowerPoint is a really useful bit of software, everyone knows. There are those moments in everyone’s lives, when they wish, really wish they knew how to create a slick PowerPoint presentation that they could use to get their ideas across, bulleted text transitioning across the projection screen. Well, here’s a neat little guide that’ll help you learn the basics of and some simple ‘how to’s’ in MS PowerPoint.

Let’s begin with something fairly basic. Here’s how you can mate a graphics item or text in a PowerPoint presentation to an email address. First, you select the graphic/text you want to link to the email address. Secondly, you need to right-click your selection and select ‘Action Settings’ from the menu. Now, click ‘Hyperlink to:’ and choose the URL from the list that’s dropped down. Key in the email address you want into the text box as follows: mailto: emailaddress@domainname.com. Clicking the OK button twice will close the window.

Moving on, let’s find out how we can change the default file location of MS PowerPoint. What you have to do is, select ‘Options’ from the ‘Tools’ menu and click ‘Save’. Look for the Default file location box and specify the drive and the folder path of your preferred storage location. Remember, this won’t work unless you’ve already created the folder that you’ve specified as the new file location. Hit OK.

If you want to control the placement of a certain graphic item such as clip art or a photograph or a stats chart, you’ll need to first select it. Then hit Ctrl and hold it down while using the arrow keys on your keyboard to position the graphic. This also works for text.

This one might seem a little complicated, but it actually isn’t. Embedding TrueType fonts is actually quite simple. Once your presentation is ready, go to ‘File’ and click ‘Save As’. Once the ‘Save As’ box has opened, click ‘Tools’ in the drop down menu and choose ‘Save Options’. Look for the ‘Embed TrueType Fonts’ command in the ‘Save Options’ box and hit OK. And voila.

Now let’s get to something a lot of people wish they could do. After reading this, you’ll be amongst those who can! This tip will let you know how you can erase the previously rehearsed recorded timings and begin from scratch. This, too, isn’t complicated at all. All you need to do is this. First you have to select to the ‘Slide Sorter’ view. Then comes ‘Ctrl+A’ which, of course, selects all your slides. Now go to the ‘Slide Show’ drop down menu and click on ‘Slide Transition’. Once you’ve done this, set ‘Automatically After’ – which is in ‘Advance’ – to the value of ‘0’ (zero) . Finally, ‘Apply to All’ will clear the slate and all timings will be removed from all the slides in your presentation!

In conclusion, let’s discuss how to jump to a specified slide in a PowerPoint presentation, during a slide show.

This might come at the end, but it’s pretty much the simplest of all the tips so far. What you have to do is, key in the number of the slide, and hit ‘Enter’. Alternatively, you could place your cursor at any point on the screen and perform a Right-click. Once you’ve done this, point the cursor to ‘Go’, then to ‘By Title’ and finally, single click the Title text of the desired slide. That’s it!

So you see how simple and easy to use Microsoft PowerPoint really is?