Organizing MS PowerPoint 2010 Slides now much simpler using Sections

MS PowerPoint 2010 has a host of new and powerful features like embedding video from online sites, trimming and formatting the embedded video within it’s own interface, powerful image editing capabilities and transitions to give that hi-fi look to your presentation.

Preparing and giving a presentation becomes a pain when you have to work with a large number of presentations. Many times the slides fall into different categories like Introduction, First Part, Second etc. MS PowerPoint 2010 now gives you the ability to organize and arrange slides into sections to easily manage them.

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Adding a Section

You can add a section from the ‘Add Section’ icon from the Slides section on the Home ribbon. (see above screenshot) You can also right click on a slide and select ‘Add Section’ from the context menu.

Working with Sections

You can view and work with sections in the left Slides Panel. Once a section is added, you can do many things with the section such as giving it a proper name by selecting Rename Section from the right click context menu. You can also arrange sections by dragging them up or down. Double click on the section to collapse or expand it.

With this feature you can easily organize your presentation by grouping all related slides under one section. This makes finding and editing related slides easy. However we expected to find a way to run slides belonging to a particular section from the Custom Slide show menu in the Slide Show ribbon. But we couldn’t find any such feature, which would make it more easy for users while giving the presentation.

The Slide Sorter Presentation view in the View ribbon will let you get a good overview of your sections and their slides.

Printing Slides in Sections

MS PowerPoint 2010 may not yet be giving you an easy way to run slides from a section. However it gives a quick way to print slides belonging to a section. The Print menu from the BackStage view shows all sections in your presentation. BackStage view is a newly added feature in MS Office 2010 to give users an easy way to access the most often used commands like Save, Open, Print etc. Click on the MS Office icon at the top left corner to go BackStage.