In this tutorial, you’ll get a quick but very powerful tip on how to optimize your PowerPoint setup and how to use the Quick Access Toolbar (QAT) and custom shortcuts to save a ton of time when creating pitch books, presentations, stock pitches, and more.
Welcome to another tutorial video this time we’re not going to be answering a reader or student question but instead i’m going to be sharing with you a very quick powerpoint tip that takes under 10 minutes to set up and implement and is going to save you hours and hours and possibly even days of time each week so the problem here is that when you use powerpoint for
Investment-banking pitch books and case studies and investment recommendations stock pitches anything like that many of the shortcuts that are most common are also very difficult to access and use and quite cumbersome to type so just as one quick example think about what you have to do to enter a simple left or right alignment in powerpoint so let’s say you have a
Slide that looks something like this where you have these two boxes that are obviously misaligned you want to align both of them to the left now to actually do something like this i’ll just open another file so you can see the built-in way to do it is to press alt each go to the home menu and then g for group and then a for a line and then l for a line left so you
Have to press 5 separate keys the alt key then release it press the h key then the g key then the a key and then the l key to align them to the left so you have to select both shapes then press that 5 key sequence it may not seem that bad but the problem is that in a single presentation you may have to do this thousands of times if you look at one of our example
Pitch books here many of our slides have these types of rectangular shapes and menus and all sorts of other slides we’re going to have to enter these types of commands many many times and that is the problem with these built-in shortcuts now beyond just the alignment commands there are many other built-in common shortcuts that are actually quite cumbersome to enter
For example the distribution command is alt h g a and then h or v for horizontal or vertical the bring to front command is alt h g r so for example if you have two shapes here and you want to put one of them top of the other you have to press alt h g and then are to bring one to the front so a four key sequence the font color which you change all the time and the
Shape fill the shape outline insert shape even all of these are harder than they should be and they are either three or four key sequences so with the font color for example you have to go to alt h and then f c if you do it the built-in way so four separate keys effectively to get to that menu id and the problem with all this is that these are not just random shortcuts
That you don’t use that much use them repeatedly and in powerpoint really the set of shortcut keys and commands that use is much more limited than what it is in excel and excel you have a wider variety that you use all the time but powerpoint it’s somewhat limited and you’re always going to be distributing aligning shapes changing the font color or changing the fill
Color and so on so the solution to this is something called the quick access toolbar now in my other powerpoint file here i’m just going to bring this over the quick access toolbar is simply what appears right here below the normal ribbon menu so anything that appears there is considered to be part of the quick access toolbar and the advantage of this is that you
Don’t have to go through that whole extended shortcut combination to access this instead you can just press alt 1 and access the alignment commands or alt 2 and access the font color commands and you can set this up yourself and immediately get started using it in powerpoint now for this to make sense whatever shortcut you want to set up your own custom version of
Has to be some long and cumbersome and there shouldn’t be an existing control shortcut for it so for example if you want to group shapes together let’s say you like two shapes and you want to move them as one object you can press ctrl-g to do that there’s no real point in creating a separate command for this because control g is pretty easy to type and it’s already
Built in so there’s no real point in doing it there we recommend using positions 1 through 4 in the quick access toolbar for the most frequent commands and then 5 through 9 for less common ones and then 0 1 through 0 9 for the even less common ones now the fastest way to do this is to simply import the customize quick access toolbar we’ve already created but it may
Not always work depending on your version of powerpoint so if you’re using an older version in other words not 2016 or 2013 or something after that you may have to create your own quick access toolbar instead which will show you how to do right here so our view of the most common shortcuts in powerpoint for financials are the following align objects is number one
You’re always going to be aligning and distributing things and then right after that the font color the shape fill and then the outline color are also very important now this one about more options that you see right here is really about the left and right alignment and the padding and all sorts of other options related to the shape or the text itself it’s a way
To go beyond the simple formatting options for font colors and fill colors and so on and change around a lot of other settings you’re also going to be using that a lot the arrange command is mostly for bringing objects forward and backward and you’re going to use that quite a bit as well font size is also important but probably less important than the font color
So that’s why it’s later on the list and then after that we have a bunch of commands for different shapes the rectangle shape is the most common one followed by text boxes other shapes lines and merge shapes at the bottom and if you go in alt tío to access the options menu and then you go to quick access toolbar right here you can see exactly how ours is set up
In this file to set this up the easiest way to do it is to download the exported version of our quick access toolbar that we created if you’re watching this on youtube just click show more below the video and then scroll to the bottom under resources and then you can actually just download this file and then attempt to import it into your version of powerpoint
So once you have that file then you go to the options menu lto the quick access toolbar and then import or export under customizations to grab everything so in this file for example i can go to all tío i’ll go to my quick access toolbar right over here on the left hand side and then i want to go to import-export right under customizations and i’ll say import
Customization file and then i can just select this powerpoint qat exported exported ui right here and once i do that we get all of our commands now in this case we already have our command set up so it’s a little bit pointless to go in to replace everything but that is how the process works and how you can do it on your own if you cannot do that if it doesn’t
Work because you’re using an older version of powerpoint you can also do this yourself just go to options the quick access toolbar go to all commands and then you can just add them manually so for example if you go to alt t oh quick access toolbar what you can do here is just select this one at the top and say choose commands from and you can say all commands
Here rather than popular commands change it to all commands and then you can just go through this list and search for the ones that you want you probably want to find the alignment commands first align objects right here for example and then you can just go to add click on add and then they’ll move over to the side and then you can also add separators and other
Things from this list the separator one is at the top so you can go in and create this yourself and the first one here will always have the alt 1 key the second one will be all 2 or 3 or 4 or 5 and so on and so forth as you go down the list so you can take a few minutes and also create it on your own now what is the end result of all this what’s the point of this
And how does it save you time well just consider how much faster the shortcuts are to enter now the alignment command is now alt 1 and an l for left r or t or b for right top or bottom so we’ve reduced it from 5 keystrokes down to 3 keystrokes the distribute command is also down from 5 keystrokes to just three keystrokes alt one and then h or v bring to front is
Now three keystrokes rather than four and then the font color effectively was four keystrokes before now it’s just to shape fill is just 2 rather than four the shape outline is two rather than four and then even insert shape is now two or two-and-a-half really as those two three or four before so this takes about one minute if you’re importing our file or maybe up
To ten minutes if you have to set up your own quick access toolbar it’s going to save you hours of time let’s say for example that you get a very messy misaligned unformatted slide from a senior banker who’s lazy it doesn’t want to do it or an intern who doesn’t know what he’s doing and let’s say it looks something like this now on this type of slide i’ll just go
In and show you what have to do to actually fix this you would essentially have to go in and if you did it the built-in way first you’d have to start by distributing all these objects at the top and on the side so you have to go to alt hg a and then each for distribute horizontally and then you have to select everything on the side using the mouse and then alt hg
A v for distribute vertically and then you’d have to go through and select all these objects and align them to the top of each box so alt h g a t and i think you get the idea then you’d have to go through and align all the columns to the left of each box here so it is a very very cumbersome process whereas if you do it a little bit differently and use our built-in
Shortcuts look at how much faster it is if we want to distribute everything at the top we can press alt 1 h we have that and then on the side all 1 v we have that and then over here we can just move everything over a little bit and then select the one the top alt 1 l and then we can keep doing that and select everything or 1 l and it is dramatically faster than the
Built-in way of doing this now because i like math and because i think about these issues all day long i actually made some calculations to show you just how much time and effort you can save from doing this you have to enter two distribution commands the built-in way takes five keystrokes our version takes three and then you have to enter eight alignment commands
Which takes five keystrokes for each command normally our version takes three so using the built-in shortcuts you have to enter fifty keystrokes using our quick access toolbar shortcuts you only have to enter 30 keystrokes so you save about 40 time and effort here just from this very simple setup and as an added bonus it’s a lot easier to type all one or all two
Or alt one l as opposed alt hg al which involves moving your fingers all over the keyboard so that’s another bonus of this method so to summarize a lot of the built in powerpoint shortcuts are cumbersome to enter and they’re going to cost you a lot of time when you create your own presentations dl case-studies investment recommendations stock pitches and more
The better solution is to create custom shortcuts for the most common commands add them to your quick access toolbar and customize your powerpoint setup like that you can do this by downloading and importing our file or if it doesn’t work create your own quick access toolbar shortcuts in the options menu go to all tío then the quick access toolbar part and then
Just move over the commands that you want to be there in the order that you want them you’ll probably save around 30 to 40 percent of your time in powerpoint by doing this which can easily add up to hours each week or if you’re in powerpoint a lot even potentially days of time each week which means that you get more free time you get to go home earlier and using
Powerpoint to create these presentations is far less painful
Transcribed from video
PowerPoint Shortcuts Investment Banking: Quick Tips By Mergers \u0026 Inquisitions / Breaking Into Wall Street
