Getting Started with Sections in PowerPoint 2011 for Mac

No matter if your presentation has many slides or just a few, you will always want them to be easily manageable. PowerPoint’s Sections organize slides into segments or divisions for easier management. If you have many slides, you may find the content difficult to handle, edit, or even deliver without Sections. And if you have fewer slides, even then it helps to organize them logically in Sections. The Section option within PowerPoint 2011 for Mac enables you to divide your presentation slides into logical segments.

All new presentations contain no Sections, but you can add Sections as needed. After you create a Section, you can show or hide slides within that Section as required. Figure 1, below, shows a sample presentation with a few logically organized sections within the Slides Pane in Normal view. Notice how each Section is named to describe its content slides. The number suffixed after the Section name represents the number of slides that Section contains.

Figure 1: Presentation with sections in Slide pane within Normal view

Now, look at Figure 2, below, and you can see the same Sections, but now within Slide Sorter view.

Figure 2: Presentation with sections in Slide Sorter view

Once you divide your presentation into Sections, you can move them backward and forward in a presentation. Also, you can go directly to a particular Section during the slide show. And, you can also print slides only within one or more Sections.

In this series of tutorials on Sections, we will learn more about the following techniques:

1. Adding and Renaming Sections,
2. Moving Slides Between Sections,
3. Removing Sections,
4. Reordering Sections, and
5. Viewing Sections