Joe Houghton shows how to use PowerPoint's Zoom feature to create an interactive navigation slide that lets you jump between sections during a presentation. Organize slides into sections, insert a Summary Zoom, and press 1 then Enter to jump back to the menu. Perfect for presentations where you want to choose topic order on the fly.
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Hi, my name is Joe Houghton, and today I'm going to show you a way of creating interactive presentations. Presentations where you can jump from place to place in the presentation, different sections of your slide deck, for instance. Very easily and in a very professional-looking way. And this is built into Microsoft PowerPoint. It's been in PowerPoint since 2019, and I only just found out about this this morning, which is why I'm making this little video about it, because I think it's a really useful tip that a lot of educators and presenters of all kinds will get some benefit out of. So let's dive in. So I've got an example deck up, and as you can see, it's a deck on project management. So if we have a look at the— down in the bottom right-hand corner at the view that shows us all the slides in the presentation, and I'll just zoom out there just so that we can see a bit bigger all those different slides. Now you may notice something which you may or may not do in your presentations, but I've got my slides split up into sections. So you can see we've got 1.1 Introduction, and we've got a set of slides on the introduction, and then we've got Teams and Leadership and Goals and Stakeholders. And I find that this is a really good way for me to structure what I'm going to talk about and also it gives some pause points between each topic area. So this is good practice when you're setting up presentations in general. So if you've just got 30, 40 slides all in, all in one go, it's very easy to put in sections. So let me just show you how I do that, and I've got an example here. So if we go to the top, you can see the first bit of the introduction is just my introduction and about me and what we're going to cover. And then I want to break just here. I want to put a section in just before this, and we'll call this, I don't know, 1.2 Project Management Fundamentals. So what you do is you click between the slides where you want your section insert to be, and then up here on the Home menu, there's an option for Section. And if you click on the down arrow, you can add section. Okay, so that breaks the slides at this point and allows you then— you see where it says Untitled Section here? I can click on that and I can put in an untitled section. So I can title this section. Okay, so maybe I'm going to call this 1.2 Project Fundamentals. Now, To be honest, the title is really just for your benefit. Okay, it doesn't show up when you're running the presentation, but again, you know, I mean, it's just good practice to give it a good title. So now you can see we've got another section in there. Now let's say that I wanted to break this bit into another section, say here, but I wanted to put in another section title slide, and that's one of the theme slides that you can normally insert. So let's say I want to insert another section here, I can go to New Slide, and I can choose my Section Start themed slide. There we are. And then if I double-click on it, it's just giving me my master style, and now I can put in a new section title there. Okay, so now that's giving me that slide in my sequence. And then I'd need to come back in here, and I can do it in this view as well. There we are. Yeah, and go up to Section and add another section, and it'll break there again. And now we can just call that, you know, 1.3. Let's call this Agile. Okay, so there's our initial work done on organizing our our slide deck, because that's one of the things that you need to do. First, you need to organize your slide deck, and then you can very easily set up this way of navigating between the different sections. And that's what I'm going to show you next. So now we've organized our slides into sections. What we need to do now is we need to insert a way of navigating around those slides, and this is where the magic comes in. So let's do that now. So let's go up. So imagine that we start our presentation and we've got our session today is going to cover these areas. What you're typically going to do then is you're going to set up sections headers for why I need project management, teams, leadership, goal setting, stakeholders, risks, whatever your main titles are, and that's what we've done here. And we've we've broken our slides down, and we've put a section header in. So I'm going to insert a new slide, but instead of going insert slide, what I'm going to do is I'm going to make a new slide, but I just want to use the title only for now. So let's just insert a slide with title only. Now the next bit is go up to insert. And then go across the bar here until you find this Zoom button. And if you just click on the little down arrow next to Zoom, you've got various options, and the one we want is Summary Zoom. Now, if you click on Summary Zoom, Microsoft PowerPoint will show you your whole deck, but it will highlight all the slides that are based on the section header. And I showed you how to do that a little bit earlier on. So you can see we've got the first slide, and then here we are, there's our first section header. And if I scroll down through this deck, you'll see that all the section header slides are chosen. Okay, so we can, we can either hold the Control key or the Command key and unselect one of those slides if we don't want it included, or we can select that or any of the other slides, and then we just insert them. And what that does is that inserts those however many slides into your slide, your main navigation slide. Okay, and then we might put in something like, where do you want to go next? Okay, let's play. So that's up here now in our summary section, and we can put that where we like. Now, one little trick in PowerPoint when you're playing a PowerPoint is that by just pressing the number 1 and then Enter, that will move you straight back to slide number 1. So if you leave this summary section slide as slide 1, you can always just jump back to it really quickly by just hitting 1 and Enter on your keyboard. So if I now play this presentation, so now we're giving our presentation, if Okay, where do you want to go next? So you can talk to your class and you can say, okay, well, you know, do you want to talk about goals next, or would you like to talk about managing risk, or teams and leadership, or whatever? So they say, oh, let's, let's do goals. So you click on goals and it zooms into there, and when you click again, you're now at the goals section. So now we can click through goals. 1, 2, 3, 4, 5. 6. 5, 6, 7, and then as soon as you've finished that section, PowerPoint brings you back to this navigation slide. So this is a super way of changing your PowerPoint presentations from a purely linear delivery where you have a set of slides in a particular order and you want to deliver them in that order to perhaps making it part of the class discussion or part of the class decision-making of what topics you're going to hit when. You could also put a much bigger deck together, for instance, you know, more slides than you would ever cover in one session, for instance, and give the students, you know, the option of choosing what we're going to do this session. So, giving students choice brings them into the conversation and is a great way of enlivening a classroom. So this is a really, really useful tool. It's built into PowerPoint. Why not give it a go?
