How to Easily Jump and Randomly Shuffle PowerPoint Slides?

Are you looking to add some excitement and unpredictability to your PowerPoint presentations? Jumping to specific slides and randomly shuffling the slide order can be great ways to keep your audience engaged and make your presentations more dynamic. In this guide, we’ll walk you through the simple steps to jump between slides and randomize their order in PowerPoint.

Why Jump and Shuffle Slides in PowerPoint?

There are a few key reasons you might want to jump to specific slides or randomly shuffle the slide order in PowerPoint:

• To keep your audience on their toes and engaged by mixing up the presentation flow
• To easily navigate to relevant content based on audience questions or discussion
• To reuse slides in multiple presentations without having to maintain the same linear order
• To create interactive quizzes or games where the order of questions/prompts is randomized

Jumping and shuffling slides allows you to adapt your presentation on the fly and make it more responsive to your audience. It’s a useful skill for any PowerPoint user to have.

How to Jump to Specific Slides in PowerPoint

PowerPoint makes it easy to quickly jump between slides in a presentation. Here’s how to do it:

1. In PowerPoint, open the presentation you want to work with
2. Click on the Slide Sorter view icon in the bottom right
3. You will now see thumbnail images of all your slides
4. Ctrl+Click (Windows) or ⌘+Click (Mac) on the slides you want to be able to jump between to select them
5. On the Transitions tab, click the “Add Bookmark” drop-down and select “Add Bookmark”
6. With the slides still selected, go to the Insert tab and click “Action”
7. Under “Mouse Click” select “Hyperlink to:” and choose “Place in This Document”
8. Select the slide you want to jump to from the “Select a Place in This Document” dialog and click OK
9. Click OK again to save the action setting

Now when you’re presenting, clicking on the selected slides will instantly jump you to the bookmarked target slide. This works both in the presenter view and when clicking the slides directly.

Here’s a quick summary:

With these steps you can easily link slides together and navigate between them in any order during your presentation.

Keyboard Shortcuts for Fast Slide Jumping

Once you’ve added bookmark links to slides, you can also use keyboard shortcuts to jump to them even faster:

• Ctrl+G (Windows) or ⌘+G (Mac) opens the “Bookmark” dialog with a list of your bookmarks
• Type the bookmark name or use the arrow keys to select it
• Hit Enter and you’ll instantly jump to that bookmarked slide

This can be very handy when you need to spontaneously skip ahead or revisit previous content in response to audience cues or questions. The bookmark shortcuts work in both the editing view and presentation view.

How to Randomly Shuffle Slides in PowerPoint

In addition to targeted jumping, you can also automatically randomize the order of some or all of your slides. This can be useful for keeping repeat presentations fresh, or for creating randomized prompt sequences. Here’s how to set it up:

1. In PowerPoint, open the presentation you want to shuffle slides in
2. Click on the Slide Sorter view icon in the bottom right
3. Ctrl+Click (Windows) or ⌘+Click (Mac) to select the slides you want to randomize
4. On the Transitions tab, click the “Add Bookmark” drop-down and select “Add Bookmark” (if you haven’t already bookmarked these slides)
5. On the Slideshow tab, click “Custom Slide Show”
6. Click “New” to create a new custom show
7. Enter a name for your custom randomized slideshow
8. In the Slides in presentation: box on the left, Ctrl+Click (Windows) or ⌘+Click (Mac) the slides you want to include in the randomized set and click Add >>
9. Check the “Advance slides manually” box if you want to control when you advance to the next randomized slide during your presentation
10. Click on “Randomly to set the shuffle option
11. Click OK to save your custom show settings

When you’re ready to present, go to the Slide Show tab and click “Custom Slide Show” and select the randomized show you just created. The selected slides will now display in a random order each time you present that custom show.

To summarize:

Custom Shows are a powerful way to create alternative versions of a presentation that rearrange or filter the full slide set. The random shuffle option introduces even more possibilities for keeping your slide content fresh and unpredictable.

Tips for Using Slide Jumps and Random Shuffles Effectively

While slide jumps and random slide shuffles are useful presentation tools, there are a few best practices to keep in mind:

• Use jumps and shuffles strategically, not just for the sake of mixing things up. Make sure they serve a legitimate purpose in making your presentation more engaging, interactive, or reusable.
• Keep your audience oriented when jumping between slides. Provide context for where you are jumping to and why it’s relevant to the current discussion.
• If using random shuffles, make sure the slides make sense in any order. You may need to tweak slide content to avoid confusion when they get reshuffled.
• Practice with your jumps and shuffles before presenting to make sure you’re comfortable with the flow and can navigate smoothly.
• Don’t overdo it with too many jumps or overly randomized content. Your presentation should still have a coherent structure and narrative arc, even if it’s not purely linear.

Used judiciously, slide jumps and random shuffles are valuable ways to inject some spontaneity and novelty into your presentations. They allow you to be more responsive to your audience and to keep your slide content feeling fresh no matter how many times you present it.

Summary

As we’ve seen, PowerPoint offers some useful tools for adding interactivity and unpredictability to your slide presentations. Jumping to bookmarked slides lets you instantly navigate to relevant content during a presentation, while randomly shuffling slides can help keep your audience engaged or allow you to create self-randomizing quizzes and prompts.

The key steps are:

1. Selecting the desired slides in Slide Sorter view
2. Bookmarking those slides
3. Adding hyperlink actions to create quick jumps, or
4. Creating a Custom Show and setting the shuffle option for randomization

With a bit of preparation and practice, you can start livening up your presentations with these dynamic slide navigation techniques. Your audience will appreciate the variety and responsiveness, and you can make your slide content more versatile and reusable.

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Trish Dixon

Trish Dixon is the founder of PPTBliss and a PowerPoint expert with over a decade of experience in presentation design. Passionate about visual storytelling, Trish shares her expertise through easy-to-follow tutorials on slide design, animations, transitions, and best practices, helping professionals create impactful presentations across industries.

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