Automation on PowerPoint: the ultimate guide to becoming more efficient

As a regular user of PowerPoint presentations, you have mastered the exercise: build a convincing speech to present a brand, project or concept, find the ideal angle to captivate your audience, then design an impacting visual medium. An exciting exercise... but also extremely time consuming.

Because once the message is ready, you have to move on to formatting. And this is often where time flies: constantly repeating the same layout, alignment, style manipulations... Over and over again, this visual creation phase can quickly become tedious, even frustrating.

PowerPoint now offers solutions to automate all or part of these tasks, thanks to internal functionalities, but also to smart external tools. Discover our favorite tips and tools to save precious time and make your PowerPoint creations faster, smoother and ever more professional.

PowerPoint automations: multiple benefits

A time-saver

Establishing automations on PowerPoint is save precious time on repetitive and often time-consuming tasks. According to the types of automations (which we will see just after), it is possible to avoid recreating each Slide manually, which always takes a lot of time.

In addition, automation options help you integrate your data directly, avoiding going back and forth between different documents. You can also streamline the creation of your Slides and the overall presentation of your content, while reducing manual adjustments and optimizing the work process. It's all good! '

Reinforced visual coherence

In addition to saving time, PowerPoint automation tips help you reinforce the visual coherence of your presentation, by imposing uniform graphic standards that are automatically repeated on all slides.

You can thus define from the start harmonized layouts, choosing fonts, colors, and element locations. This way, you avoid unintended variations due to random copy and paste, even when multiple people are working on the same document.

A professional and quality image and service rendering

All of these elements allow you to get a professional rendering for your PowerPoint presentation, by guaranteeing a careful layout and a smooth flow, and by saving you from manual errors that impact visual quality.

Automations ensure the clarity of The sequence of slides : your presentation is thus more impacting, pleasant, dynamic and immersive. Pro rendering allows the audience to focus on the message and facilitates interaction, for a service at the top of its quality.

The different types of PowerPoint automations, for optimal rendering

Layout and design automations

The first type of automation Basic for your PowerPoint presentation is the overall design and layout of the slides. This allows for global harmony for your final support.

To create a homogeneous structure with a coherent visual identity, you can use the automations directly integrated into PowerPoint, for example:

• Les slide masks, also called Layers, allow changes to be applied to all the slides.
• Les custom templates and themes, which you can create with your brand graphic charter and share, then reuse endlessly.
• Les design and style suggestions, via the designer PowerPoint Designer, which gives you design ideas for your slides, the style options built into PPT, and theSmartArt tool that automatically organizes your visual content in the form of graphics, for example.

Content and data automations

You can integrate automations that allow the automatic insertion of data. First, by creating links with Excel (you thus maximize the use of your Office Pack), you have the possibility to automatically insert into your PPT Of graphs and updated tables with your current data.

You can also add a dynamic web page in your PowerPoint presentation, which will be automatically updated, in real time.

Finally, you can create macros for your PowerPoint supports : it is a group of instructions grouped together in the same command, in order to facilitate the execution of a repetitive task. Very practical to avoid always having to recreate your supports from scratch!

Presentation and animation automations

Another possible type: presentation automations and visual animations for your PowerPoint. They are interesting to integrate because they make the experience dynamic and fun! To do this, they must be well controlled: you can therefore predefine the transitions and animations and, in this way, make the presentation more fluid.

Then, to allow for a TED Talk type service, calculated to the minute, where you talk without having to worry about going to the next slide, you can Automate the scrolling of your PowerPoint. To do this, you can determine the Passage time for each slide, or save your presentation with time for each slide. Thus, you program the automatic scrolling of Slides to model it on Your speech !

Finally, to boost your presentation, you have the possibility to integrate interactive media. For example, you can add videos, GIFs and other visuals, for an animation without manual intervention.

Collaboration and delivery automations

To gain even more time and efficiency when developing your PowerPoint materials, it is essential to automate collaborative work tasks as much as possible. To do this, you can activate the comments and co-editing in real time, by creating a collective workspace via OneDrive or Teams, so that the whole team can move forward on the same document and avoid going back and forth.

Once your PPT support is complete, export it in the file type that suits you, in PDF, video, or as a standalone slideshow. Feel free to set it up as auto-run presentation For facilitate dissemination and reading by other users.

Finally, the ultimate automation step for your PowerPoint presentations is thePower Automate integration in your creation tools. It is a platform for automatic generation of presentations from your data (forms, databases) through the use of artificial intelligence.

Additional tips to save time on PowerPoint

Essential keyboard shortcuts

A good habit to know and use when working on PowerPoint: Keyboard shortcuts. They allow you to save time and efficiency on several manipulations.

You can use:

• Alt + L to see The welcome from the PPT app;
• Alt + W to access the tab Slideshow ;
• Ctrl + Shift + C, then Ctrl + Shift + V for copy/paste ;
• Ctrl + T to change the typography ;
• Ctrl + K to insert a hyperlink ;
• Ctrl + G or B to put text in greasy ;
• Ctrl + I to put text in italics ;
• Ctrl + U for underscore ;
• Ctrl + J for substantiate one paragraph;
• Ctrl + S for save your presentation.

Image compression for a one-size-fits-all presentation

For your PPT file to be lightweight and therefore easy to open on all types of media for you and your collaborators, consider compress images that you integrate. This will allow visuals to be displayed correctly when reading the support, without charging time that affects the fluidity of the presentation.

To do this, go to “Image Format” - “Adjust” - “Compress Images”. You can then choose to compress all images of the presentation, or just a few, and determine their resolution.

To go further: the VBA editor for coders

For IT pros, you can push the automation of your PowerPoint creations even further, through the use of The VBA editor (Visual Basic for Applications) that allows you to create your macros by coding.

Type “Alt+F11” to open the VBA editor, then activate the “Developer” tab. Then add a new module via “Insert” > “Module” and start writing your VBA code to create the macro of your choice, without forgetting to execute it.

Your VBA scripts allow you to automate repetitive tasks including formatting, adding various elements, or even exporting Slides. Encore Time saved !

As we have seen, PowerPoint is full of tools and tips for automating as much as possible the creation of your materials and the execution of your presentations. You are thus in a position to save a lot of time and efficiency, once you have mastered and implemented these automations.

In addition, these shortcuts can be used collaboratively, which allows all your teams to adopt them, and this, on the same medium. You can also insert your brand graphic charter on your creations to fully appropriate the final PowerPoint support.

‍We hope that these tips on automating your PowerPoint manipulations will be used to optimize your time when developing your next presentations. If you want to know more about the secrets of PowerPoint, feel free to contact us to benefit from the follow-up of our experts to enhance your projects!