An interactive overview in a PowerPoint presentation: the Summary Zoom

When giving a presentation, i.e. in Slide Show mode, many people tend to prepare the slides in a strict sequence. This can result in a presentation with many ‘intermediate slides’ which show the overview or agenda of the presentation.

But these intermediate overview slides are not actually necessary. You can easily switch between overview and a specific topic/slide in the presentation, without the need to manually create specific slides for this purpose.

In PowerPoint, you can use the Summary Zoom. This will result in an interactive slide with a corresponding zoom effect, which gives you an extremely easy way to move around your presentation. You’re probably thinking ‘that’s a lot of work..’. No, not at all, it only takes a few clicks.

So how does Summary Zoom work?

Step 1. Create sections

If you want to work with various topics, it’s best to start with Sections. This allows you to subdivide your presentation into different topics/chapters. Creating sections in PowerPoint is quite simple.

• On the left-hand side of the presentation screen, click the slide that starts a new “section” of your presentation.
• Then click Section, Add Section. Give it an appropriate name.

On the left-hand side of the screen, you will see the subdivision in sections. You can close or open the sections by clicking on the triangle in front of the section name.

Step 2. Create the summary zoom

After the sections have been created, it’s now easy to create the slide with Summary Zoom. Do this by going to Insert, Zoom, Summary Zoom on the ribbon. You will be prompted to create a Summary Slide with a link to the first slide of each section. You can change this if you wish. Confirm your choice.

You will now see that a ‘Summary Section’ has been added to the sections. In this section, that is the slide with the Summary Zoom.

Step 3. use the Summary Slide in the Slide Show

You can now use the Summary Slide with zoom effect in the Slide Show.

Simply click on one of the small images. There will be a zoom effect to the first slide of the section you clicked on.

You can now scroll through the slides of this section one by one. t the end of the section, the zoom automatically returns to the overview. Next, you can select another section, to move to a different section with a zoom effect.

Another interesting feature of SlideShow is that you can return to the Summary Slide at any time. This gives you the option to be able to show the summary without having to navigate through any other slides.
Do this by using the extra button at the bottom of the slide in the Slide Show. This will show the summary again.