Customize PowerPoint keyboard shortcuts

Recently, a fellow editor was looking for help assigning keyboard shortcuts in PowerPoint. They’d already discovered that PowerPoint doesn’t boast the same level of customizability as Word, despite both apps being part of the Microsoft Office suite. Indeed, some comments on the post (this was in a Facebook group) suggested there was no way to customize keyboard shortcuts in PowerPoint at all. However, I was happy to report that after some hunting via Google, I found a solution to make user-friendly keyboard shortcuts for any PowerPoint commands using the Quick Access Toolbar. Here’s how.

The steps:

Go to File>Options>Quick access toolbar.
Scroll to find the desired command in the panel on the left. If it’s not there, in the “Choose commands from” drop-down, select “All commands” and look again.
Click to highlight the command then hit “Add>>.”
Note the position of the command in the list in the panel on the right. If it’s, say, number 6 (counting from the top), then you’ll be able to trigger it using Alt+6. If you want, use the arrows on the right to change the position. For example, put it in first place, and it will be triggered by Alt+1.
Hit OK, and you’re done.

Example:
Here’s how it looks, making “strikethrough” the first command on the Quick Access Toolbar so that it’s triggered by Alt+1.

First, the “Customize the Quick Access Toolbar” window with “Popular Commands” selected:

Select “All Commands,” find “Strikethrough,” hit “Add>>” and move it to the top of the list:

Bingo. Alt+1 now adds the strikethrough effect to selected text. (The Slide is something I was working on just now.)