Presentation properties are the details about a presentation such as title, author name, subject, and keywords that identify the document's topic or contents etc. It's important to specify relevant values for the presentation's Property attributes,
because they help to identify the presentation. Populating the fields for various Properties also helps you search for
particular slides more efficiently later.
Here are some types of document properties:
- Standard properties are set automatically by the application and include Author,
Title, and Subject. You can also specify your custom text values for these properties.
- Automatically updated properties includes both file system properties (File Size,
File Date, etc.) and statistics that are maintained for you by the application. These properties cannot be
changed. You can use the automatically updated properties to identify or find documents. For example, you can search for all
files created after August 3, 2005, or for all files that were last changed yesterday.
- Custom properties are the additional properties for your presentation. You can assign a text, time, or
numeric value to custom properties, and you can also assign them the values yes or no. You can choose from a list of suggested
names or define your own.
To view and edit current presentation properties in PowerPoint
2016, follow these steps:
- Open any presentation in PowerPoint that has been saved at least once. Access the File menu, and choose
the Info Pane to get to
Backstage view, as shown in Figure 1. The area on the right side displays the Properties
of the current PowerPoint presentation, as shown highlighted in red within
Figure 1.
Figure 1: Properties of the presentation within Backstage view
- Within the Properties pane click the Show All Properties option (shown highlighted in
blue within Figure 1, above). This action displays properties such as
presentation Size, the number of Slides, Hidden Slides, the number of
Multimedia Clips presentation has, etc. as shown in Figure 2.

Figure 2: All presentation properties displayed
- Within the Properties pane some of the entries are editable, and some are not. Just hover your mouse
cursor over any detail of a property. The editable sections will change the cursor into edit mode; in Figure 3
you can see that the Title of the presentation is editable.

Figure 3: Presentation Title can be edited
- Although PowerPoint automatically adds Author name, you can change it if required. Additionally, you can
add more Authors from your Address book. To do that just click the Search Address Book for
Contacts icon (highlighted in red within Figure 4), placed right next to
the Add an author option.

Figure 4: Search Address Book for contacts icon
- This opens your default Address Book dialog box, as shown in Figure 5. Within the dialog
box select the contact you want to add as author, and click the To button (highlighted in
red within Figure 5).

Figure 5: Address Book dialog box
- This will add the selected contact to Message Recipients, as shown highlighted in
red within Figure 6. Add as many contacts as you want, and click the
OK button (highlighted in blue within Figure 6).

Figure 6: Contact added to Message Recipients
- This adds the selected contact as Author within the Properties pane, shown highlighted in
red within Figure 7.

Figure 7: Selected contact added as author
- Click the Properties button within the Properties pane to bring up a drop-down menu, as
shown in Figure 8. There is one option within the drop-down menu, both of these options are explained in
our Advanced Properties
tutorial.

Figure 8: Properties drop-down menu
- Save your presentation often.
See Also:
Properties of a Presentation in
PowerPoint 2013 for Windows
Properties of a
Presentation in PowerPoint 2010 for Windows