Clicking and holding down on your mouse whilst moving the cursor allows you to draw shapes and select areas much more easily than depressing the trackpad while moving your finger around it. This means you can speedily work on slides and effortlessly use tools like PowerPoint’s Freeform shape.
Quick keys
There are some helpful shortcuts that romanian phone number improve productivity in presentation design that can be carried out using your keyboard and mouse. For example, using the shift key whilst enlarging an object to ensure accurate scaling can be really helpful. We have even more useful tips for keyboard shortcuts in PowerPoint and Google Slides to help increase your efficiency. Even with these time saving tricks, you’ll probably end up wasting more time than you save if you’re fiddling with the trackpad.
The Magnifier
Windows has a great Magnify feature you can control using your keyboard and mouse. This technique is useful for showing people data sets with small text sizes, complex screenshots, or a live program. It helps your audience to see things more clearly and allows you to focus their attention on just the important elements on the screen. It can be a bit tricky to set up, but once you have, you’ll never look back. Read our how to guide for step-by-step details.
Once you’ve selected a comfortable, ergonomic mouse, why not go the whole hog and invest in an external keyboard? Freeing up your laptop to be used predominantly as a monitor allows you to raise the screen and get the optimal posture your body needs. Whether you’re in the office or at the kitchen table, you should raise the screen (the top of the screen should be in line with your eyes when you sit up straight) to banish aches and pains caused by poor working posture.
Hopefully the importance of a mouse to presentation design has clicked (see what I did there?) by now! Of course, if you’re stuck on a plane or train and need the convenience of the trackpad to make some last-minute changes it’s okay to compro-mice (that’s it I promise!) and use the trackpad on the-go. However, for day-to-day presentation design, the humble mouse might just be your most important tool.