MS PowerPoint: Views, Slide Master and Shortcuts

The correct answer is D, F5. Pressing F5 anywhere in a presentation closes the editing window and runs the slide show from slide one, whichever slide you were working on. To begin instead from the slide on the screen, the key is Shift + F5, and the pair F5 and Shift + F5 should always be learnt together.

Option A, Alt + F5, does not start an ordinary show from the beginning; in recent versions it opens Presenter View, where the speaker sees notes and a timer. Option B, Ctrl + P, is the print command in editing view, and inside a running show it turns the mouse pointer into a pen for writing on the slide, so it never starts the show. Option C, Alt + Tab, belongs to Windows rather than PowerPoint and merely switches between the open programs on the taskbar.

The correct answer is A, only (i) is false. Statement (i) is wrong because Ctrl + N opens a brand new, empty presentation; the key that inserts a new slide into the open presentation is Ctrl + M. Statement (ii) is true: PowerPoint 2016 can save or export a presentation as a PDF through Save As or Export, a facility Office has carried since the 2007 version.

Option B says only (ii) is false, which reverses the position of the two statements. Option C claims both are false, but the PDF facility plainly exists in PowerPoint 2016. Option D says neither is false, which would make Ctrl + N a slide-inserting key and is exactly the confusion the paper setter is testing. Remember the pair: Ctrl + N for a new file, Ctrl + M for one more slide.

The correct answer is C, .pptx. From PowerPoint 2007 onwards the default save format is the XML-based Open Office format, whose extension is .pptx, and PowerPoint 2016 follows it. Option A, .ppt, was the default of the older 97–2003 binary format and survives only for backward compatibility. Option B, .potx, is the extension of a design template, a file kept to start new presentations from rather than to hold one presentation. Option D, .ppsx, is a PowerPoint Show: the same content saved so that double-clicking it opens straight into the full-screen slide show instead of the editing window. A macro-enabled presentation, which appears as a distractor elsewhere, takes .pptm. Learn the four together, because papers mix them in a single question. In the hall, read the option list slowly: .pptx and .ppsx differ by a single letter, and that letter s stands for show.

The correct answer is D, Slide Sorter View. It lays every slide of the deck side by side as a thumbnail, so a slide can be dragged to a new position, copied, hidden or deleted, and the flow of the whole presentation can be judged at a glance. Option A, Reading View, plays the presentation inside a window for one reader and does not allow reordering. Option B, Notes Page View, shows a single slide with the speaker notes printed below it, one page per slide. Option C, Normal View, is the main editing view; it does show a thumbnail strip on the left, but its purpose is editing the slide in the middle, and the question asks for the view built for arranging slides.

The correct answer is A, Ctrl + M. It adds a fresh slide below the selected slide, using the layout of the current one. Option B, Ctrl + N, is the trap: it does not touch the open file at all but opens a new blank presentation in another window. Option C, Ctrl + D, duplicates whatever is selected, so with a slide selected in the thumbnail pane it makes a copy of that slide, complete with its text and pictures, rather than an empty new slide. Option D, Ctrl + K, inserts a hyperlink on the selected text or object, linking it to a web page, another slide or a file. The commonest examination error is choosing Ctrl + N here, so tie Ctrl + M to "one more slide".

The correct answer is B, Transitions. A transition is the visual effect between two slides — Fade, Push, Wipe, Split or Morph — and its gallery, duration, sound and advance timing all sit on the Transitions tab. Option C, Animations, is the near neighbour that papers use as a distractor: it applies effects to objects inside one slide, such as making a bullet fly in or a chart grow. Option A, Design, carries themes, variants, colours, fonts and the slide size, which change the look of slides but not the movement between them. Option D, Insert, is for adding content — tables, pictures, shapes, charts, headers, footers and slide numbers. Fix the rule in one line: between slides is a transition, within a slide is an animation. One more pointer worth carrying: the Transitions tab also holds the Apply To All button, which copies the chosen effect to every slide of the deck in one click.

The correct answer is C, Animation. Animations act on the objects of a slide — text, shapes, pictures, charts, SmartArt — and fall into four groups: Entrance, Emphasis, Exit and Motion Paths. Their order and timing are managed in the Animation Pane, and the Animation Painter copies an effect from one object to another. Option A, Transition, is the effect between two slides, not within one. Option B, Theme, is the ready-made set of colours, fonts and background effects that gives the deck a uniform look. Option D, Layout, is the arrangement of placeholders on a slide, such as Title Slide or Title and Content. Only the animation moves a single object, which is why C is right. A memory hook helps here. A transition needs two slides to exist at all, while an animation needs only one object, so any question that names a single picture, a single chart or one line of text is asking about animation.

The correct answer is B, the slide currently on the screen. Shift + F5 is the "play from here" key, and it saves a presenter from running through a long deck while checking one slide. Option A describes plain F5, which always begins at slide one; the pair F5 and Shift + F5 is the distinction the question rests on. Option C is wrong because PowerPoint offers no shortcut to begin a show at the last slide; during a show the End key jumps there instead. Option D is wrong on two counts: hidden slides are deliberately kept out of a normal show, and no shortcut begins a presentation at one. Remember Shift + F5 as "show from the current slide". On the Slide Show tab the same two commands appear as From Beginning and From Current Slide, which is a safer way to recall the pair than the keys alone.

The correct answer is D, Slide Master View. The slide master holds the formatting that every slide built on it inherits — title font, body font, bullet style, background, colour scheme and the position of a logo — so one edit there updates the whole deck. It is reached from the View tab, and with it come the Handout Master and the Notes Master. Option A, Normal View, edits one slide at a time, so the same change would have to be repeated on every slide. Option B, Slide Sorter View, only arranges slides; it cannot change formatting. Option C, Outline View, shows nothing but the text of titles and placeholders and is used for drafting content quickly, not for design. Note also that one deck may carry more than one slide master, one for each design used in it, and every master brings its own set of layouts with it.

The correct answer is B, .potx. A template stores the theme, masters, layouts and sample content that new presentations are started from, and its extension in the current format is .potx; the older format used .pot. Option A, .pptx, is an ordinary presentation, the default save format from PowerPoint 2007 onwards. Option C, .pptm, is a macro-enabled presentation, needed when the file carries VBA code; a macro-enabled template, in turn, takes .potm. Option D, .ppsx, is a PowerPoint Show, which opens directly in the slide show view and is handy for sending a finished presentation to someone who should only watch it. Papers list all four in one question, so hold them as a set. A quick rule ties the four together: pptx for a presentation, potx for a template, pptm when macros sit inside the file, and ppsx when it must open as a show.

The correct answer is C, 9. The Print pane of PowerPoint offers handout layouts of 1, 2, 3, 4, 6 and 9 slides per page, so nine is the largest number, and the 3-slide layout is the one that leaves ruled lines beside the slides for the audience to write on. Option A, 4, and option B, 6, are genuine handout layouts but not the maximum, which is exactly how the paper setter makes them tempting. Option D, 12, is not offered at all; at that size the text of a slide would be unreadable on paper. Along with the handouts, the Print pane can also print Full Page Slides, the Notes Pages and the Outline, and the setting appears once the Handouts group is opened.

The correct answer is B, Apple Macintosh. The program was created by Forethought Inc., where Robert Gaskins and Dennis Austin designed it, and the first version ran on the Apple Macintosh in 1987. Microsoft bought Forethought in the same year, which is how PowerPoint entered the Office family. Option A, Microsoft Windows, came later: the first Windows version of PowerPoint appeared in 1990 alongside Windows 3.0, and papers often use the 1990 date as a distractor. Option C, MS-DOS, is wrong because a character-based operating system could not show the graphical slides the program was built for. Option D, Linux, is wrong on dates as well: Linux itself began only in 1991, four years after PowerPoint was released. For the examination, hold the dates together: 1987 for the Macintosh release and for Microsoft buying Forethought, and 1990 for the first Windows version of PowerPoint.