Organize your PowerPoint presentations using sections

Section in PowerPoint is a good concept introduced in PowerPoint 2010 that helps you to organize your presentation.

The slide titles and numbers start blurring together, and navigating through the presentation becomes impossible. You simply lose track of where you are! There must be a better way to keep slides organized!

In PowerPoint 2010, you can use the new Sections feature to organize your slides, much like you would use folders to organize your files. You can use named sections to keep track of groups of slides, or you can assign sections to colleagues to make ownership clear during collaboration. If you’re starting with a blank slate, sections can even be used to outline the topics in your presentation.

This new feature is nice to organize your presentation content in different sections. Is like using folders but in a PowerPoint presentation instead of the file system. You can separate your content based on topics as well as chapters or other style of organization.

Why Sections in PowerPoint are very useful?

By using sections you can at least:

• Divide the slides into logical subgroups
• Organize the chapters using meaningful names
• Reorder sections using the drag and drop
• Apply effects in groups (sections), for example the same animation transition to all the slides under a section
• Collapse sections
• Hide all the slides in a given section
• Delete all the slides under a section

The feature is easy to be used. You can add, edit, remove sections by using the Sections menu in PowerPoint 2010. For example, the following screenshots show how to add a basic section to separate your presentation content.

Once you create new sections, you can rename the section name or remove the section if is no longer used by right clicking on top of Untitled Section and using the options under the contextual menu.

This feature is also good for design companies or people who is designing a presentation since helps you to organize the content in the edit view and keep an eye in the overall information at once.

Sandy Yu, program manager of Microsoft PowerPoint advice us that “the best way to handle a big task is to break it down into smaller parts, and sections will do just that for your presentation”. You can learn more in the official Microsoft Office website.