7 tools to boost your PowerPoint productivity

When you’re creating a high-stakes PowerPoint presentation, you never want to sacrifice quality, so you’ll often end up sacrificing time. Simply working faster can lead to misalignments and inconsistencies that can damage your credibility, however well-constructed your messaging and storyline might be.

In this article, we introduce seven tools that will speed up your PowerPoint work and give you a significant amount of time back, without compromising on consistency:

1. Align and resize
2. Replace and resize fonts
3. Insert symbols
4. Switch decimal symbols
5. Change proofing language
6. Save or send slides
7. Clean up and sanitize

You can read detailed instructions on where to find these tools and how to use them, including all options and functionalities, in our user manual.

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SPOILER: The tools covered here are all available within the think-cell Suite. You can download a free 30-day trial today and see first-hand the difference they can make to your PowerPoint productivity.

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1. Align and resize

Being able to align and resize objects in PowerPoint efficiently is a huge time-saver. Without exception, every object on a slide should be the right size and every object should be correctly aligned. And this won’t happen by chance.

As well as PowerPoint’s in-built options, think-cell users also benefit from three additional resizing functions that are an invaluable complement to alignment. If you’ve ever typed in 9.87 cm to set the width of a rectangle—and then changed it to 9.89 cm when your layout shifts—you’ll know how fiddly manual adjustments can be.

Same Width, Same Height, Same Size: three simple-sounding, yet powerful buttons that will ensure your slides look slick. And because they work just like PowerPoint’s native functions, you can align, resize and distribute your elements seamlessly, intuitively, and without having to use a numeric keypad.

2. Replace and resize fonts

The process of building a presentation often means compiling information from a range of sources and copying text into your slides before editing and arranging it. Depending on exactly how it’s inserted, a text will often retain its original font and formatting, wreaking havoc on your otherwise consistent slide appearance.

If it’s just one footnote, you can probably fix it yourself, but if you’ve got a full presentation of complex slides with texts coming from multiple sources, you’ll want a tool like replace and resize fonts. With a couple of clicks, you can instantly set your whole presentation to your corporate typeface, including chart annotations and even slide masters. Comic Sans has nowhere to hide.

3. Insert symbols

PowerPoint has a menu that lets you insert a vast range of symbols you can’t normally type with your keyboard. Unfortunately, as there are over a thousand symbols and no meaningful search function, you can waste a lot of time hunting before you find that elusive sum (∑) or plus/minus (±) symbol.

That’s why think-cell’s insert symbols tool is so valuable. It cuts the fluff and gives you what you need for business presentations in one clear menu. No scrolling. No emojis. No Wingdings.

4. Switch decimal symbols

Decimal symbols might seem like a minor detail, but 1.234 means something very different to 1,234. In an important business presentation, you’d probably prefer if your numbers weren’t off by a factor of a thousand.

Particularly when collaborating internationally, it’s easy for decimal points and commas to get mixed up when users with different regional settings edit or add slides. Going through a presentation and checking every single figure of every single chart isn’t the most rewarding experience, and even then you might miss something.

The switch decimal symbols tool lets you target all your presentation’s charts in one go. This gives you the peace of mind to be able to share your budget with your European colleagues without accidentally slashing their quota by 99.9%.

5. Change proofing language

Another common cause of headaches can be your presentation’s language settings. Everyone might be writing in English, but when you run the spellchecker, you’ll see perfectly correct words flagged as spelling mistakes. This can easily happen when people based in different countries contribute to the presentation and PowerPoint retains the local language for each slide.

Setting the language in PowerPoint is a tedious exercise, as you can only do it for one slide at a time. For a presentation of any meaningful length, you’ll want to use think-cell’s change proofing language tool, which you can apply to the whole presentation at once to save time, cut out errors and only see that squiggly red underline when you’ve made a genuine spelling mistake.

6. Save or send slides

There’s little point building a top-notch presentation if you don’t show it to anyone. But often you’ll need feedback on individual slides before your presentation is really top-notch enough to be shared around.

Sending someone a largely unfinished presentation when they only need to see one slide is a recipe for confusion. With send slides, you select exactly what you want to share. This level of control keeps your communication efficient, respects your colleague’s time, and means you won’t get helpful comments on slide 47 asking if ‘Think of a good action title to go here’ is the best choice of heading.

7. Clean up and sanitize

Whenever you’re sharing slides in a business environment, there’s always a risk of oversharing. Forgetting internal comments or presentation notes can easily cause you mild embarrassment and, in extreme cases, could even harm your career.

It’s always best to leave just the on-slide content and remove information you’d rather not share, even from the file’s metadata. Use clean up and sanitize to ensure you’re delivering a polished piece of work and avoid leaking need-to-know information to someone who really doesn’t need to know.

Build better presentations faster with think-cell Tools

think-cell Tools are part of our commitment to supporting every stage of the presentation creation journey. Work faster and with increased accuracy to create not just charts, but world-class, error-free presentations that will drive your business forward.

If you haven’t tried using think-cell Tools to boost your PowerPoint productivity yet, you can download a free 30-day trial today that includes full access to the entire range of think-cell Suite features: