Playing Custom Shows in PowerPoint 2011 for Mac

The purpose of creating custom slide shows is to present them to your audience. To do that, you could access the Custom Shows dialog box, and then select a show and then choose to play it. But yes, that's a long process indeed. In this tutorial, we will show how you can access the same custom show in a easier way. And then, we will also show you how you can set any custom show as the default, which means that when you actually play your presentation in Slide Show view, only the slides within the custom show you select will be shown.

Follow these steps to play a custom slide show in PowerPoint 2011 for Mac:

1. Open the presentation within which you have created the custom slide show.
2. Access the Slide Show tab of the Ribbon, and click the Custom Shows button, as shown highlighted in red within Figure 1.
3. 
   Figure 1: Custom Shows button
3. This brings up the Custom Shows drop-down menu, as shown in Figure 2. Here you can see the list of all Custom Shows created, we created one custom show that we named Sample Show. You can see this listed within the Custom Shows drop-down menu.
4. 
   Figure 2: Custom Shows drop-down menu
4. Click the name of the custom slide show to play it.

Here's an alternative option that lets you set any custom show as the default slide show:

1. Access the Slide Show tab of the Ribbon, and click the Set Up Show button, as shown highlighted in red within Figure 3.
2. 
   Figure 3: Set Up Show button
2. This opens the Set Up Show dialog box, as shown in Figure 4. Here, select the Custom show radio button (highlighted in red within Figure 4).
3. 
   Figure 4: Set Up Show dialog box
3. Click the up/down arrow button (highlighted in blue within Figure 4, above) to see the list of custom slide shows. Choose the custom slide shown you want, and click the OK button.
4. The next time when you bring up Slide Show view, you'll see the custom show you selected earlier.

You can learn some tricks with Custom Slide Shows in our Tips for Custom Shows in PowerPoint 2011 tutorial.