Timesaving PowerPoint keyboard shortcuts using Shift and Ctrl

Like all software, PowerPoint has keyboard shortcuts — in fact a lot more than I will cover here. It’s always worthwhile to learn a few shortcuts that you’ll use often because you’ll save time and aggravation.

I am still surprised at how many people save by going to the File tab and click the Save item. Or copy by right-clicking and choosing Copy. The keyboard shortcut is so much faster!

I don’t set a good example when I teach, because I try to use methods that people can see on the screen that I’m sharing. So I’ll right-click and choose Copy so my students can see what I’m doing but when no one is looking, I always use Ctrl+C!

The Shift and Ctrl keys are especially useful in PowerPoint, so here are my favorite PowerPoint keyboard shortcuts. Please add yours in the comments!

1. Ctrl+C: Copy a selected object
2. Ctrl+X: Cut a selected object (to move it)
3. Ctrl+V: Paste the object you copied or cut
4. Ctrl+D: Duplicate selected objects. If you do this additional times, PowerPoint remembers the distance and direction and creates a line of equidistant objects.
5. Ctrl+drag: Copy and move the selected object at the same time. This is a real timesaver.
6. Shift+drag: Constrains the movement of the selected object to vertical or horizontal
7. Ctrl+Shift+drag: Copy and move the selected object, constraining the move to vertical or horizontal
8. Ctrl+Shift+C: Copy formatting. This is a gem. It’s the same as Pick Up and often works better than the Format Painter, which is similar.
9. Ctrl+Shift+V: Paste formatting. This is the same as Apply.
10. Shift+resize with a handle: Constrains the object you’re inserting to a square, circle, equilateral triangle, etc.
11. Ctrl+Shift+resize with a handle: Resizes the object from its center rather than from the handle you’re dragging
12. Ctrl+A: Select all objects
13. Ctrl+Z: Undo your most recent action. This doesn’t work all the time, but it works most of the time.
14. Ctrl +G: Group multiple selected objects
15. Ctrl+Shift+G: Ungroup the objects in a group
16. Ctrl+Space: Play or pause media
17. Tab: Indent selected text. I know, this doesn’t involve Ctrl or Shift but the next related item does.
18. Shift+Tab: Outdent text (Move it to the left)
19. Shift+F3: Toggle sentence, lower, and upper cases
20. Ctrl+K: Insert a hyperlink
21. Alt+Shift+C: Copy animation
22. Alt+Shift+V: Paste animation
23. Ctrl+S: Save. Use this often!

This blog post has been re-published by kind permission of Ellen Finkelstein – View the original post .