With zooms, you can take your PowerPoint presentation to a new level. Turn a boring linear slide show into an explorative presentation where you can even spontaneously change your narrative.
To build a hierarchical PowerPoint presentation, you need overview slides from which you can jump to subordinate slides. Here’s the video again showing the zooms in action. In the following, I’ll explain how you can achieve this effect.
Slide Zoom
The most flexible way to create such an overview slide is the slide zoom. Go to the menu “Insert” – “Zoom” – “Slide Zoom”.
A dialog box will now appear where you can select the slides that should appear in the overview.
Quick tip: use the Shift key to select multiple slides.
Jumping from Level to Level
In my example, I’m creating an overview slide that refers to three slides: Insects, Birds, and Mammals.
These are in turn overview slides that refer to three more slides one level deeper. You get the story…
With the slide zoom, PowerPoint creates a preview image of each selected slide, which you can then arrange on your overview slide as you like. The preview image automatically gets the appropriate link. The best part is: when you change the slides, the preview images automatically adjust to the new content.
Section Zoom
Now, manually creating overviews via slide zoom can quickly get out of hand. That’s why there’s another useful tool in PowerPoint: sections.
In PowerPoint, you’ll find a sidebar on the left edge of the window with all your slides. There you can change the order of your slides or directly select a slide for editing.
What many don’t know: here you can also divide your slides into sections. In my example presentation, I’ve made a section for each genus.
You can now target these sections with the section zoom. In the zoom dialog, only the first slides of each section are displayed. You add these to an overview as described above.
When you click on one of the displayed slides during the presentation, you land in the corresponding section. Now you can linearly click through all slides of the section as usual. After the last slide, PowerPoint leaves the section and goes back up in the hierarchy to the overview page.
Summary Zoom
If you want to make it even easier for yourself, choose the summary zoom. Select the necessary slides in the dialog box and PowerPoint will automatically create the corresponding section structures for you. Two steps in one.
This all sounds a bit complicated, doesn’t it? But it’s actually not when you follow the steps directly in PowerPoint. Feel free to use my example file for this.
