Use PowerPoint’s Summary Zoom for More Dynamic Presentations

The most common Microsoft PowerPoint presentations make a beeline from the first slide to the last. It’s a bit predictable and boring. But great presentations, like great stories, should not be forced to follow a linear slide-by-slide path.

A new feature in PowerPoint 2016 called “Summary Zoom” enables you to jump in and out of different slides and create exciting variations.

How Summary Zoom Works in Microsoft PowerPoint

This is how PowerPoint describes Summary Zoom: the freedom to jump from any slide to any other slide and back again helps you to add more interactivity to your presentations. It’s like the main index from where you can go from one place in your presentation to another in any order you like. Zoom for Microsoft PowerPoint is only available to Office 365 subscribers and only on Windows.

Here’s how you can set it up:

1. When your slides are ready, go to Ribbon > Insert > Zoom.
2. From the dropdown, select Summary Zoom.
3. The Summary Zoom Insert dialog will open and ask you to select the slides you want to include in the zoom.
   
4. Once you have selected the right slides, click the Insert button.
5. The Summary Zoom slide will be created, and it will appear as a new slide placed just before the first slide you included in your Summary Zoom. Enter a title for this slide and save your presentation.
   

Go to the Slideshow view and use the Summary Zoom to take your audience through the key parts of the presentation. You can weave a little story with the slides selected in the Summary Zoom. You can ignore the other slides in-between that don’t need to be part of your narrative. The Summary Zoom feature helps you create a smoother slideshow and explain it better.

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