PowerPoint presentations often contain more slides than you need to show your audience. Whether you want to remove slides temporarily or skip over certain slides during your presentation, PowerPoint allows you to easily hide and unhide slides.
Why Hide Slides in PowerPoint?
There are a few key reasons you may want to hide slides in your PowerPoint presentation:
- Remove unused slides – As you build your deck, you’ll likely create slides you don’t end up needing. Hiding lets you keep those slides instead of deleting them, in case you want to unhide them later.
- Hide slides with sensitive information – If your presentation contains proprietary data or other sensitive information, you can hide those slides when presenting publicly.
- Skip over slides – When delivering your presentation, you may want to skip certain slides but still keep them in the deck. Hiding slides allows you to skip them temporarily.
- Organize with sections – You can use hidden slides to organize your presentation into sections. Hide all slides outside the current section so only relevant slides are visible.
How to Hide Slides in PowerPoint
Hiding a slide in PowerPoint only takes a few clicks:
- Open your PowerPoint presentation and navigate to Normal view.
- Select the slide you want to hide in the left side Thumbnails pane.
- Right click the slide and choose Hide Slide from the menu.
The slide number will now show a strikethrough line, indicating it is hidden. You can hide multiple slides at once by Ctrl+Click selecting them first before right clicking to hide them all.
Unhiding Hidden Slides
When you want to unhide a slide, the process is just as easy:
- In Normal view, locate the hidden slide in the Thumbnails pane. Hidden slides are grayed out.
- Right click the hidden slide and select Unhide.
The slide will become visible again in the main slide canvas.
Showing Hidden Slides During Presentation
If you want to display a hidden slide during your live presentation, you can easily do so:
- Right click the current slide and choose See All Slides.
- When the presentation switches to the thumbnail view, select your hidden slide.
- The hidden slide will now display full screen and your presentation will resume from there.
This allows you to dynamically show hidden slides on the fly as needed.
Tips for Hiding Slides
Here are some tips when working with hidden slides in PowerPoint:
- Use Slide Sorter view to quickly see all slides and identify hidden ones.
- Create custom slide shows to organize different versions of your presentation with different hidden slide combinations.
- Collapse sections around hidden slides to simplify your outline and hide whole sections.
- Use Presenter View to privately see your hidden slides and notes.
Conclusion
The ability to hide and unhide slides gives you flexibility when building and delivering PowerPoint presentations. By hiding slides, you can remove slides without deleting them, organize content into sections, and dynamically skip slides during your presentation. Just remember a few simple clicks lets you hide or display slides on the fly.
With this understanding of hiding slides in PowerPoint, you can now build more effective presentations and control what slides your audience sees. Use hidden slides strategically to organize information and draw attention to the most important content dynamically during your presentation.
Related Resources:
How to Remove the Background of an Image in PowerPoint
