5 Hold Shortcuts Every Investment Banker Should Know

#3. The New Slide Shortcut

The New Slide shortcut allows you to insert a new blank slide into your presentation based on the layout you were just working on. So, if you’re working on a two-column layout, hitting Ctrl + M will create a new blank two-column slide for you to work on.

Adding new slides is one of the most common activities you perform in PowerPoint, which is why the new slide (Ctrl + M) is a critical shortcut for any Investment Banker or Consultant.

#4. The Duplicate Shortcut

With an object selected, hitting the Duplicate shortcut creates a duplicate it, which is twice as fast as the Copy and Paste shortcuts, as it is two keys strokes instead of four.

On top of that, the Duplicate shortcut has a hidden jump feature. If you duplicate an object and move it elsewhere on your slide, hitting the shortcut again will place a new duplicate object at the same distance as the first one.

This works because PowerPoint remembers how far and in which direction you move your first duplicate objects.

#5. The Paste Special Shortcut

The Paste Special shortcut gives you a variety of options for the format in which you can paste objects in PowerPoint. It’s especially handy for inserting text stripped of its formatting, and for pasting in elements as pictures.

This is the secret to getting at the metafile formats on the PC versions of Microsoft PowerPoint that allow you to do cool things like ungroup tables.

Turning on Hover to Discover

What I call ‘Hover to Discover’ is a new feature in the Microsoft Office suite that displays useful information about features and commands when you hover your mouse over them.

On top of that, for the most important commands (like those covered above), it will also display their respective shortcut keys.

That means that if you forget the keyboard shortcut for Paste Special, for example, you can simply hover your mouse over its command in the Ribbon and see exactly what its shortcut is.

By default, these features should be turned on in your version of PowerPoint, Word or Excel. However, it could be that yours have been turned off.

Feature #1. Turn on Show Feature Descriptions in ScreenTips.

To turn on this feature, follow these steps:

1. Go to the File menu
2. Click on Options
3. Select General (pictured above)
4. For ScreenTip style select Show feature descriptions in ScreenTips

Feature #2. Turn on Show shortcut keys in ScreenTips

To turn on this feature, follow these steps:

1. Go to the File menu
2. Click on Options
3. Select Advanced
4. Scroll down to display
5. Select Show Shortcut Keys in ScreenTips

Hold Shortcut biggest mistake?

The biggest mistake when learning your Hold Shortcuts is trying to learn them all before you need them.

For example, two GREAT Hold Shortcuts are:

1. Ctrl + K to insert a Hyperlink
2. Alt + Shift + C for the Animation Painter

While these are GREAT shortcuts if you are creating interactive presentations with hyperlinks or creating cool effects with animations, if you never need to use either one, they’re a horrible waste of your time.

Your brain can only remember so many things at any given time, so I recommend not gumming it up with shortcuts you will never use.

With your Hold Shortcuts down, now you are ready for a slight variation on these which can instantly double the number of PowerPoint shortcuts you know.

Up Next …

In the next lesson we’ll cover Shift-Sister Shortcuts.

By Taylor Croonquist

I’ve had millions of dollars of funding riding on PowerPoint pitch books and proposals that needed to be perfect, and I was sick of working on them until 3AM in the morning only to have a boss or client decide to change 90% of it when they reviewed it the next morning. So I geeked out on PowerPoint: I joined groups, bought books, went to conferences and worked backwards through everything I thought I knew. I took the most time intensive tasks that waste your time and figured out how to get PowerPoint to do them for you. After more than a decade of pursuing PowerPoint proficiency, I’m excited to teach it to you!