While presenting and interacting with your audience, annotation on a slide can play an important role, and PowerPoint provides you
with useful Pen and Highlighter tools that can change your static slide into a whiteboard upon which
you can doodle and write! In this tutorial, we will learn how these tools can be helpful.
Follow these steps to learn about the Pen and Highlighter tools
in PowerPoint 2016:
- Open any existing presentation and change to Slide Show
view. Now hover your cursor to the bottom left corner area of the slide to see some navigation icons, as shown highlighted
in red within Figure 1, below.

Figure 1: Navigation icons in Slide Show View
- Among these icons, click on the Annotations tool to bring up the fly-out menu that you can see
in Figure 2, below. Choose the Pen tool for now from this menu.

Figure 2: The fly-out menu
Tip: You can also press the
Ctrl+
P keyboard shortcut in
Slide Show view to change to the
Pen tool.
Press
Ctrl+
A in Slide Show view when done to revert back to the default Arrow cursor. Want more
keyboard shortcuts? Get a copy of our
PowerPoint Keyboard
Shortcuts Ebook.
- The cursor changes to a small colored dot. The default color of this dot is red. Start doodling or writing on your slide
now, as shown in Figure 3, below.

Figure 3: Doodle or write with the Pen tool
- To change the ink color, navigate to the fly-out menu again. Notice the Standard Colors available
here (highlighted in red within Figure 2, shown earlier on this page). Choose any
color.
- Now doodle or write again. This time you will see your annotations in another color, as shown in Figure
4, below. Do note that only new annotations will sport the new color, and existing annotations will still show the previous
color.

Figure 4: Another color to annotate with
- Now let's use the Highlighter tool and see how it differs from the Pen tool. To do so,
click on the Annotations icon to access the fly-out menu and choose the Highlighter option, as shown
in Figure 5, below.

Figure 5: The Highlighter tool
- The Highlighter cursor uses yellow when selected initially. The color can be changed in the same way as we changed the
color for the Pen tool as explained previously on this page. We decided to use both yellow and green colored
Highlighters to focus on text on the slide. Now when you annotate with the Highlighter, you will notice that this tool, just like a
real Highlighter is semi-transparent. It's also thicker than the Pen tool.

Figure 6: Added highlights
Tip: For both the Pen and Highlighter tools, you can draw straight lines by
holding the Shift key before you start annotating! Also you can:
Press E to remove all annotations made now.
Press Ctrl+E to change to the Eraser tool.
Press Ctrl+M to hide all annotations. Press Ctrl+M again to show
them again.
Press Ctrl+L to change to a Laser Pointer.
Want more keyboard shortcuts? Get a copy of
our PowerPoint Keyboard Shortcuts Ebook.
- Similarly, add annotations to all your slides. Do note that annotations look better if you use a stylus or pen,
especially if you are using a touch-enabled computer such as the Microsoft Surface, but you can also manage basic annotations with a
regular mouse or laptop trackpad! Getting straight lines will take some practice.
- When you have finished your presentation, or when you press the Esc key, you will see the "Do you want
to keep your ink annotations?" message, as shown in Figure 7, below. It is a good idea to click
the Keep rather than the Discard button since there's no way of getting these annotations back if
you choose the latter option.

Figure 7: Do you want to keep your ink annotations?
- When we chose to keep annotations, we see them now as something similar to shapes. Plus, all annotations added using
the Pen tool will be grouped into one shape, as shown in Figure 8, below. If you have any highlights
added on the slide, each of those highlights will be saved as a separate shape. Yet these are not really shapes, these are what
PowerPoint calls "ink". There's so much more you can do with these annotations. We explore editing "ink" in
our Ink Tools in PowerPoint 2016 tutorial.

Figure 8: Annotated "ink"
- Save your presentation often.