Choosing the Best PowerPoint View for Your Task
In PowerPoint, selecting the right view helps you work more effectively. You can find various View options on the View tab.
Views for Creating Your Presentation
- Normal view: The main editing view with three areas—thumbnails pane, slide pane, and notes pane—where you can write and design your presentations.
- Notes Page view: Show or hide speakers notes using the Notes button at the bottom of the slide window, or access it via the View tab.
- Outline view: Great for making global edits, getting an overview of your presentation, rearranging bullets or slides, and applying formatting changes.
- Slide Sorter view: Displays slides in thumbnail form, allowing you to easily reorder slides. You can also organize slides into sections.
- Master views: These include Slide, Handout, and Notes views, which allow you to make universal style changes to all slides, notes, or handouts.
Views for Delivering and Viewing a Presentation
- Slide Show view: Use this to present your slides in full-screen mode to your audience.
- Presenter view: View your notes while delivering the presentation on another screen. Access it in Slide Show view by clicking the three dots in the lower left corner and selecting Show Presenter View.
- Reading view: Display your presentation in full-screen mode, making it easy to flip through slides when reviewing without a presenter.
PowerPoint for the Web
- When your file is stored on a personal OneDrive, the default view is Reading view.
- When stored on your NU OneDrive or SharePoint in Microsoft 365, the default view is Editing view.
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