How to Organize PowerPoint Slides with "Sections"

Want to organize your PowerPoint slides a little better? There’s a behind-the-scenes trick that I love using in my own presentations: Sections!

What’s inside:
1. A demo of what sections are
2. How to add them
3. How I use them to hide topics
4. How I use them to re-order topics

What Are PowerPoint Sections?
Sections help us organize our slides into meaningful groups, categories, chunks, buckets, or chapters of a presentation. Our audience won’t see the sections. They’re for us, the presenters.

How to Add Sections
It’s easy to add new sections to a presentation.
Here’s how:
• I like to be in Slide Sorter view first. (The birds-eye-view of the presentation where you can view all the miniature slides.)
• Decide which slide is going to start the new section. Click on that slide to activate it.
• Right-click and Add Section.
• In the pop-up window, give your section a name. I use names like Introduction, Case Study, Conclusion, etc. That’s it!!!

How to Use Sections to Hide Topics
I like to keep all my slides for a given workshop within a single file.
While prepping for upcoming talks, I go through the full file – all 900+ slides! – and choose which sections I’ll talk about.
I might cover Sections A, B, and C for one group.
I might cover Sections A, D, and E for another group.
I might add Sections F, G, and H as brand new topics for another group.
(For private trainings, I review the group’s materials ahead of time and hold some planning calls to figure out which sections are going to be the best use of our time together.)
As I’m deciding which sections to include, I simply hide and unhide the slides. In the video, you’ll learn how to hide and unhide slides.
(Yes, you can hide and unhide slides without having any sections. I personally like using sections so I can think about an entire category of slides that should be shown or hidden.)

How to Use Sections to Re-Order Topics
I definitely recommend outlining your presentation in a document or spreadsheet before making all your slides.
Our outlines don’t need to be 100% finished before we make our slides. I almost always make changes along the way.
One common change is re-ordering topics. I might envision covering topics A, B, and C, in that order. But later, as I’m designing the slides, I might decide to cover topics A, C, and B.
In the video, you’ll learn how to drag and drop entire sections to re-order them.

Your Turn
Let me know how you’ve used sections to keep your content organized!

-----
Most "professional" reports are too long, dense, and jargony. Soar beyond the dusty shelf report with our complimentary mini course: https://depictdatastudio.teachable.co... You'll never look at reports the same way again.