Custom Show in PowerPoint 2013

Custom Show in PowerPoint 2013 is a nice feature that may help presenters to prepare a custom slideshow choosing which slides want to present from the original PowerPoint .pptx presentation (this feature is not new since it was available from earlier versions of PowerPoint).

But, what’s the difference between the standard way to run a slideshow and Custom Shows? Well, the idea behind Custom Shows in PowerPoint is pretty simple. Imagine that you have a PowerPoint presentation prepared with all the slides but some slides should not be displayed during a meeting. You can easily hide the slides from the presentation, but alternatively you can create a custom show and add only the slides that you want to present to certain group of users.

Additionally, if you have a PPT presentation in PowerPoint 2013 with lot of different slides but you need to change the slide order to certain group of users, then you can create a Custom Show in PowerPoint to select those slides that should be displayed and in a particular order.

Who can use Custom Shows?

This can be very useful if you have a corporate presentation that is prepared for example for different departments. A group of sales people can see only the presentations that are relevant to them, while you can define another Custom Show for the IT department.

Another useful application of this Custom Show feature is depending on the level of knowledge of your audience. If you are a teacher and want to prepare a class then you can make a single set of slides and then define multiple Custom Shows depending on the level of the students: Beginner, Intermediate, Advanced. Each group of users may have different order in the slides and different slides to be displayed during the class.

Let’s summarize some other applications of this feature.

• You can prepare a targeted lecture depending on the students level,
• Target your presentation to a specific department in your organization (Sales, IT, Accounting) and show only relevant slides.
• Change the order of your presentation slides depending on the audience.

In this example above we have created a simple presentation with different slides and then we defined a custom slide show to select only the slides that will be displayed. Also, we re-ordered the slides so when running the custom slide show the presentation will show only these slides in a custom order. This is definitely a nice feature in PowerPoint.