Refine Slides

PPT Productivity PowerPoint plugin has 200+ time saving features. Refine Slides features include a summary slide generator, a quick formatter to align slide titles, send to appendix shortcut, no fly zone text boundary airplane mode logo/ branding camouflage, format painter, footnote magnifier and more.

Add summary slide

Feature Description
Video Shortcut Links

Create a slide with a summary of your selected slide titles (or all of them), to ensure your storyline makes sense.

This can be used as the starting point for a table of contents, as the basis of an executive summary slide or just added as a temporary slide for an editorial review.

Productivity Tip

To select all slides, use the PowerPoint shortcut Ctrl-A in the thumbnail slide selector view.

Shortcut Keys

All PPT Productivity features can be used via the Customizable PowerPoint Shortcut Keys feature. You can update the shortcut keys to any preferred available combination, but to get you started we created a PPT Productivity shortcut key for inserting a summary slide: Ctrl+Alt+Shift+D

	Description	Timestamp
1	How can I add a table of contents to PowerPoint?	00:00
2	How do I create a PowerPoint Table of Contents?	00:01
3	Can I add a contents slide in PowerPoint?	00:03
4	How do I create an Executive Summary in PowerPoint	00:07
5	How to make an Agenda Slide in PowerPoint?	00:12
6	How can I add a PowerPoint Agenda slide?	00:13

Format slide title

Quickly format all slide titles in your PowerPoint presentation to make them consistent font size and weight.

Change PowerPoint slide title(s) to a standard font size and boldness title, with different settings available for the second sentence (ideal if using subtitles with a smaller font).

Applies to the current slide, or multiple slides if more than one is selected.

To set up your preferred title sizes, go to the PPT Productivity tab > Settings > Format Title. Set your desired font size and bold settings for the first and remaining sentence in a slide title.

Productivity Tip

Use Ctrl+click with the Format slide title button to also remove other formatting such as italics, or underline and convert to Sentence case

Display No Fly Zone

The No Fly Zone for PowerPoint feature can be used to set a boundary for placing text on your slide. Also known as a Title safe or Action safe border for Powerpoint slides (a reference to the old content display rules for TVs).

This feature is useful when your company has branding rules or team guidelines on text placement, or if your PowerPoint template has image or color surrounds that you need to keep text away from. Consulting firms typically use the No Fly Zone feature to ensure all slides in a presentation have a consistent content layout.

The feature shows or hides a cross hatch shading which denotes the boundary. Note that the No Fly Zone is a visual guide for editing only (similar to the standard Grid and Guides feature in PowerPoint). The No Fly Zone shading will not appear when presenting or printing PowerPoint slides, when saving slides to your Slide Library or when pasting slides as mini slides into a presentation.

Toggle the No Fly Zone on or off for your PowerPoint presentation using the feature button in the Slides group on the PPT Productivity ribbon. When the No Fly Zone is displayed, selecting the Align features on the Format Toolbar will align a selected single textbox or shape to the No Fly Zone border (e.g. Align to left will align to the left NFZ border, align to top will align to the top NFZ border).

Customize the size of the No Fly Zone to your preferences or required company standards in Settings > No Fly Zone . You can select to apply a NFZ based on your current PowerPoint template, or you can specify dimensions for a custom NFZ. You can also select to apply PowerPoint Drawing Guides along the No Fly Zone border.

Productivity Tip

Working with a team? You can customize the setup of your No Fly Zone and export this setup (along with a lot of other settings) to share it with your colleagues so that your team have the same setup. Read more about sharing custom PPT Productivity settings across a team.

Send slide to appendix

Make reviewing and refining your PowerPoint deck easy. This feature lets you single click to send slides to the end of your PowerPoint presentation. If your deck doesn't have an Appendix section, one is created automatically. Also known as the send slide to back feature.

When reviewing your PowerPoint presentation, PPT Productivity's Send Slide to Appendix feature lets you remove a slide from the main presentation and send to back of deck. You can then review the slides moved to the appendix, to decide whether to keep the slide in the appendix or delete it from your presentation.

Also known as a graveyard feature, this feature moves selected slides to Appendix so you can then review and sequence your Appendix slides and delete any unnecessary slides once your main section is finalized.

An Appendix divider slide will be automatically added to the PowerPoint presentation the first time you send a slide in your presentation to the Appendix (if there is not already an existing Appendix slide divider).

The Send to Appendix feature is on both the main PPT Productivity Ribbon and the Format Toolbar.

Productivity Tip

The Appendix slide divider will only be created once, irrespective of how many slides you send to the Appendix.

Use this feature in conjunction with Sticky Notes when reviewing your deck. For example if you have a team meeting to review your PowerPoint deck, use sticky notes to annotate any other actions i.e., to incorporate a specific point into another slide, then send the slide to appendix and finish off the updates after the meeting.

Shortcut Keys

All PPT Productivity features can be used via the Customizable Shortcut Keys for PowerPoint feature. You can update the shortcut keys to any preferred available combination.

To get you started we created a PPT Productivity shortcut key for send slides to appendix.

Send to Back PowerPoint Shortcut: Ctrl+Alt+Shift+A

Camouflage mode

Aka Airplane mode and stealth mode, PowerPoint Camouflage mode hides the background of your slide to conceal slide branding and logos on master slide layouts. Perfect when working in public spaces like airplanes, so people nearby cannot see branding or logos of your firm or client on your screen.

PPT Productivity's Camouflage mode for PowerPoint works as a toggle. The feature masks your PowerPoint slide backgrounds with a white overlay and it can be quickly turned on or off by selecting the feature. This feature is useful for working in public situations where you do not want people to see the company logo/color shown on the background.

Consultants call this feature Airplane mode because it's most commonly used for hiding client branding from nearby passengers when commuting to the client site.

Click the camouflage button on the PPT Productivity ribbon to turn on PowerPoint camouflage mode. Click again to turn camouflage mode off before you share the deck with others or once you are back in the office. To undo PowerPoint camouflage mode on another computer that doesn't have PPT Productivity installed, simply edit the Slide Master to show the background graphics and remove the transparent overlay on the Title and Content slides.

Productivity Tip

Press Shift as you open a PowerPoint presentation, and the presentation will open with Camouflage mode already enabled.

Shortcut Keys

All PPT Productivity features can be used via the Customizable Shortcut Keys for PowerPoint feature. You can easily add a custom shortcut key for camouflage mode.

Format Painter

Feature Description
Video Shortcut Links

One Click Access to PowerPoint Format Painter.

The Format Painter button has been included on the PPT Productivity ribbon, so you can access PowerPoint's standard Format Painter feature in a single click.
Format painter feature can be used copy formatting from one object and paste or apply it to another.

Productivity Tip

PPT Productivity has a range of Format Painters to save you time. Learn more about the Advanced Format Painter, the Table Format Painter and all the other Format Painters for PowerPoint.
Description Timestamp

1 How can I copy formats in PowerPoint? 00:00

2 How does the PowerPoint Format Painter work? 00:01

3 How do I apply formats in PowerPoint? 00:06

Edit Shapes

Feature Description
Video Shortcut Links

One Click Access to PowerPoint's Edit Shapes feature.

The Edit Shapes button has been included on the PPT Productivity ribbon so you can access the feature in a single click.
The Edit shapes button lets you easily change a selected PowerPoint shape to a different shape - for example maybe you added a standard rectangle to your slide but you want to change to a rounded edge rectangle.

Productivity Tip

PPT Productivity also has a Change Shape Painter which lets you quickly change shapes to match the first shape selected.

	Description	Timestamp
1	How do I edit PowerPoint Shapes?	00:00
2	Can I edit shapes in PowerPoint?	00:01
3	How do I add a shape in PowerPoint?	00:02
4	How do I change a shape in PowerPoint	00:07
5	How can I edit points of a PowerPoint shape?	00:11
6	How do I change an existing PowerPoint shape?	00:14
7	Can I convert a PowerPoint shape to a new shape?	00:15

Set Grayscale

The grayscale feature makes it easy to quickly convert PowerPoint presentation print settings for optimal grayscale or black and white printing.

This feature optimizes the greyscale version of your PowerPoint presentation for greyscale or black and white printing. Without this feature, when you print in greyscale or B&W, shapes or outlines of shapes which should be invisible or only lightly colored will show as black lines in your printed version. For example lines appear around some shapes which should not show.

In PowerPoint all shapes have a 'black and white mode' to optize grayscale, but in standard PowerPoint there isn't a way to force all shapes across multiple slides to adopt this mode for printing. When you click the PPT Productivity Greyscale feature for PowerPoint, shapes and text on your slides adopt the PowerPoint blackwhitemode, which prints well in greyscale or B&W printer mode.

Note that the feature will not change what you see when editing the slide, but it applies a change in print preview mode, in View > Grayscale mode and when printing the document.

To see how the impact of the Set Greyscale feature, go to View > Grayscale on the PowerPoint main ribbon. Select a slide with light grey borders (or white, or any pale colored borders) on textboxes or callout boxes. Black lines will appear around these items instead of the intended border shade.

However once you select Set Grayscale, the lines revert to the intended color/shade (and will now appear correctly when the document is printed in B&W or grayscale).

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