PowerPoint on Cruise Control: Conversation with Taylor Croonquist

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Taylor Croonquist is the co-founder of Nuts & Bolts Speed Training, a website delivering actionable PowerPoint training and speed strategies, helping professionals cut their build time in a third. Prior to Nuts & Bolts, Taylor lived and worked in China for 10 years in finance and consulting. When he’s not busy crafting PowerPoint training, you can find him traveling and scuba diving.

In this conversation, Taylor, the shortcuts gurus from the Nuts & Bolts blog shares tips on how not to shoot yourself in the foot with a bazooka in PowerPoint.

Geetesh: You often say that people are shooting themselves in the foot in PowerPoint? Can you elaborate?

Taylor: Yeah, they’re shooting themselves in the foot with a bazooka! Here’s what I see happen all of the time.

People sit down at their computers to build their slides and with the best intentions…

They painstakingly, one-by-one, manually do all of these things in PowerPoint that the program could easily do for them…

And PowerPoint could do it 10 times faster and 100% more accurately…It’s what I like to call “PowerPoint on Cruise Control”

Imagine that you’re pushing a gasoline mower around your yard really really hard, instead of just turning it on. Yes, if you push the gasoline mower hard enough and sweat buckets, it might work, but why not just turn the engine on and let the mower do its thing?

The same thing is true in PowerPoint.

For example, people are investing hundreds of hours a year (yes, hundreds) manually formatting their objects (pushing that mower) instead of recycling their formatting (turning the mower on). In my free Cruise Control training video, I talk about the 6 different ways to do so, that they are all almost-instant and 100% accurate.

All natively in PowerPoint too…no add-ins or extra purchases required!

And if you knew better, why would you invest 5 minutes formatting a chart (for example) when you could simply apply your formatting in 5 seconds? You wouldn’t!

But that’s what people are doing to themselves every single day in PowerPoint, and hence, how they are shooting themselves in the foot with a bazooka!

≫ See How To Put PowerPoint On Cruise Control Today

Geetesh: What’s one hidden shortcut you think every PowerPoint user should know?

Taylor: Without a doubt, it’s the bonus feature of the duplicate shortcut (Ctrl + D).

First off, the duplicate command is twice as fast as the normal copy (Ctrl + C) and paste (Ctrl + V). So right off the bat, you are doubling your speed on a common and repetitive task.

But it gets a lot better than that!

The bonus feature of the duplicate command is that when you duplicate an object a second time, the new object automatically jumps in the same direction and distance as your last manual movement.

What does that mean?

It means that if you build your slides using the concept of Relative Alignment and Positioning (something I talk a lot about in my training) as you duplicate your objects within your layout, they literally jump into perfect alignment and positioning on your slide…automatically and with no extra work on your part!

It seriously looks like magic when pulled off correctly and goes right back to getting PowerPoint to do the work for you…