PowerPoint Pro 3.

0 (PowerPoint & VBA)

PowerPoint – Setup Guide for PC/Windows, Mac, and
Parallels

PowerPoint – Setup Guide for PC/Windows, Mac, and Parallels

We strongly recommend using the PC/Windows version of PowerPoint, ideally in Office 365, because
it supports the Alt-key shortcuts, the Quick Access Toolbar, and a wider set of features than Mac
PowerPoint. Our macro package also works more reliably in the Windows version.

If you are on a Mac system, we recommend installing Parallels or another program that lets you use
Windows software and then using the PC/Windows version of PowerPoint. Another option is to pay for
a plugin or service that lets you use the Alt key shortcuts, such as Accelerator Keys.

If you are unwilling or unable to do any of these, you can still use the Mac version of PowerPoint, but
you will be far less efficient.

We cover the key setup points for each system configuration below:

Table of Contents:

PowerPoint – Setup Guide for PC/Windows, Mac, and Parallels ...................................... 1

Windows OS and Windows/PC PowerPoint .................................................................. 1
Mac with Parallels to Run PC/Windows PowerPoint..................................................... 8
Mac OS and Mac PowerPoint ........................................................................................ 9
The Ideal Computer Setup for PowerPoint (and Excel, Word, etc.) ............................ 17

Windows OS and Windows/PC PowerPoint

First, disable the Scroll Lock key on your keyboard. You will get strange behavior if it is not off in
PowerPoint and other Office programs.

Second, disable or hide the language bar so it

doesn’t interfere with the shortcuts. This is a
big problem with the Chinese language
because its shortcuts may interfere with
important Office shortcuts.

If you click the language bar icon in your

taskbar and go to “Settings” (see the
screenshot on the left) or “Language
Preferences,” you can change the settings.

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 PowerPoint Pro 3.0 (PowerPoint & VBA)
PowerPoint – Setup Guide for PC/Windows, Mac, and
Parallels

Start by going to “Keyboard” and then the “Language Bar” options on the next screen:

On this screen, make sure the Language Bar is “Docked in the taskbar” or “Hidden,” and go to the
“Advanced Key Settings” tab and disable all the shortcuts for switching between languages:

Uncheck “Enable Key Sequence” to remove the Ctrl + Spacebar shortcut for the Chinese language:

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 PowerPoint Pro 3.0 (PowerPoint & VBA)
PowerPoint – Setup Guide for PC/Windows, Mac, and
Parallels

If the changes don’t save correctly or you keep running into problems with the Office shortcuts,
consider removing the language or completely disabling the Language Bar.

Laptops and Function Key Problems

If your function keys (F2, F4, etc.) do not work properly, or you must press the Function key (“Fn”) to
make them act like normal function keys, you need to change that.

The method varies among manufacturers, but you can Google terms like “[Your Computer Model]
disabling function key” to find instructions on how to do it.

Normally, you need to enter the computer’s BIOS and make the changes there, which requires you to
reboot your system and enter a keyboard combination as the computer restarts.

This combination might be something like Fn + F2 or just one of the function keys.

Here are a few examples of how to change these settings for popular laptop models (these are just
examples – you should Google your model to find instructions on the manufacturer’s website):

• Dell laptops (Alternate Dell example)

• HP laptops (Alternate HP example)
• Lenovo laptops

You should eventually come to a screen that looks like the one below, where you can enable or disable
“Action Keys Mode” (or something similar) to change the Function key behavior:

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 PowerPoint Pro 3.0 (PowerPoint & VBA)
PowerPoint – Setup Guide for PC/Windows, Mac, and
Parallels

PowerPoint Settings

First off, you should use the English-language version of Office/PowerPoint. This is because in other
languages, the shortcut keys are sometimes different!

Unfortunately, we’ve never found comprehensive lists for all the other languages. So, we recommend
installing/re-installing Office and changing the default language to English so that your shortcuts match
up (you can still type in other languages in the text within PowerPoint).

If you go to the Options menu (Alt, T, O), here are our recommended settings, starting with the
“General” tab:

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 PowerPoint Pro 3.0 (PowerPoint & VBA)
PowerPoint – Setup Guide for PC/Windows, Mac, and
Parallels

If you’re planning to complete the VBA lessons and use our macro package, we recommend allowing
all add-ins and macros to run, or these lessons will not work properly:

If you’re going to download random files outside of this course, you should change these settings to
limit macros and add-ins. But if you stick to the course contents, these settings should be fine.

Finally, under the “Quick Access Toolbar,” make sure you’re using our custom Quick Access Toolbar
(QAT), available as a download in the first lesson of the course:

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 PowerPoint Pro 3.0 (PowerPoint & VBA)
PowerPoint – Setup Guide for PC/Windows, Mac, and
Parallels

Within the “Advanced” tab, we recommend disabling both types of hardware acceleration because
they can cause display problems:

Within “Trust Center” → “Trust Center Settings,” you should uncheck all the “Protected View”
settings while you are using this course because you’ll be downloading many files:

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 PowerPoint Pro 3.0 (PowerPoint & VBA)
PowerPoint – Setup Guide for PC/Windows, Mac, and
Parallels

If you cannot install the custom QAT, you can easily recreate it by following the instructions in Lesson 1
of Module 1.

Under “Add-ins” in the Options menu, you can also install our custom BIWS macro package – but
only if you know what you are doing.

If you are new to PowerPoint, stay away from the macros for now and set up only the QAT. You need
to learn the key commands and shortcuts before you think about automating your work.

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 PowerPoint Pro 3.0 (PowerPoint & VBA)
PowerPoint – Setup Guide for PC/Windows, Mac, and
Parallels

There are some useful 3rd-party Add-ins for PowerPoint, both free and paid, but we don’t recommend
exploring them until you’ve learned the fundamentals quite well. There are specific recommendations
for other useful Add-ins in Module 7.

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Mac with Parallels to Run PC/Windows PowerPoint

Note that all the PC/Windows PowerPoint settings in the section above apply if you’re running the
PC/Windows version of PowerPoint through Parallels.

You can skip the parts about function keys and the Language Bar since they work differently on Mac OS
(see the Mac OS settings in the next section).

You need to look at the section on the Mac OS settings because “Mission Control” and other features
may interfere with PC/Windows PowerPoint shortcuts running through Parallels!

Using Parallels presents a few unique problems as well.

First, you should go to the Parallels desktop menu → Preferences → Shortcuts → System Shortcuts
and set the “Send System Shortcuts” option to “Always”:

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 PowerPoint Pro 3.0 (PowerPoint & VBA)
PowerPoint – Setup Guide for PC/Windows, Mac, and
Parallels

You may also have to allow Parallels to control your Mac in a different System Preferences menu.

For more options, please see the Parallels article on configuring keyboard shortcuts.

There’s another helpful article with screenshots from the Parallels user guide here as well.

Another tip: If you right-click your virtual machine in the “Virtual Machine” list within Parallels and go
to “Configure,” run Windows as a separate full-screen app rather than using “Coherence Mode.”

You can also set it to use only Windows shortcuts so that you don’t run into problems with the Control
(Ctrl) and Command (⌘) shortcuts interfering with each other.

Most of these problems relate to keyboard shortcuts not being recognized in PowerPoint, usually
because Parallels is not relaying them properly or because you haven’t changed certain Mac OS
settings (see below).

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Mac OS and Mac PowerPoint

Mac PowerPoint has similar potential issues as the PC version, but you resolve them differently.

First, go to the Apple icon in the top left of your screen and click on System Preferences:

You’ll make many of these changes by going to menu items within System Preferences, especially
“Keyboard” and “Mission Control”:

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 PowerPoint Pro 3.0 (PowerPoint & VBA)
PowerPoint – Setup Guide for PC/Windows, Mac, and
Parallels

Start by going to Keyboard and changing the box for “Touch Bar shows” to “F1, F2, etc. Keys”:

As shown above, you should also ensure that the Function keys are set to work as “standard function
keys” on external keyboards.

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 PowerPoint Pro 3.0 (PowerPoint & VBA)
PowerPoint – Setup Guide for PC/Windows, Mac, and
Parallels

If your system does not have the Touch Bar, you should still check the “Use F1, F2, etc. keys as
standard function keys…” box shown above.

Next, go to Mission Control under System Preferences and remove all the shortcuts there:

These features often use the Ctrl + ↑ and Ctrl + ↓shortcuts as the default options, which will interfere
with various Office programs' Ctrl + Arrow Key shortcuts.

Next, go to Keyboard → Input Sources, uncheck everything, and remove languages besides U.S. /
English (temporarily while you use PowerPoint):

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 PowerPoint Pro 3.0 (PowerPoint & VBA)
PowerPoint – Setup Guide for PC/Windows, Mac, and
Parallels

Now, go to Keyboard → Shortcuts, click on “Mission Control,” and uncheck everything there:

Make sure that within the “Keyboard” item, the "Move focus to the menu bar" option is set to ^F2, i.e.,
Ctrl + F2. This will make it easier to access the menus within PowerPoint and other Office programs:

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 PowerPoint Pro 3.0 (PowerPoint & VBA)
PowerPoint – Setup Guide for PC/Windows, Mac, and
Parallels

Finally, go to “Function Keys” and add an exception for all the Office programs to ensure that the
Function keys work as intended without interference from system shortcuts:

Within PowerPoint, you will make the key changes from the Options/Preferences menu (⌘ + ,):

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 PowerPoint Pro 3.0 (PowerPoint & VBA)
PowerPoint – Setup Guide for PC/Windows, Mac, and
Parallels

First, go to View and make sure that your settings look like this:

Next, go to General and use the following settings:

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 PowerPoint Pro 3.0 (PowerPoint & VBA)
PowerPoint – Setup Guide for PC/Windows, Mac, and
Parallels

Under Security, make sure that all macros can run if you’re planning to complete the VBA and macro
lessons in this course:

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 PowerPoint Pro 3.0 (PowerPoint & VBA)
PowerPoint – Setup Guide for PC/Windows, Mac, and
Parallels

Finally, within the Ribbon & Toolbar menu, you should recreate our recommended Quick Access
Toolbar (QAT) shown in Lesson 1 of Module 1.

In theory, you might be able to get the QAT import process to work on the Mac, but we could not do so
reliably. So, it’s almost always faster to spend 5 minutes recreating the QAT manually in your instance
of PowerPoint.

One Note: In Mac PowerPoint, there appears to be no way to insert a “Change Font Size” option in the
QAT. Instead, there are only options to Increase the Font Size or Decrease the Font Size, so we used
the “Increase” version in the example below:

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 PowerPoint Pro 3.0 (PowerPoint & VBA)
PowerPoint – Setup Guide for PC/Windows, Mac, and
Parallels

The Ideal Computer Setup for PowerPoint (and Excel, Word, etc.)

Ideally, you will use an external keyboard, an external mouse, and a large monitor.

You will be far less efficient if you attempt to use PowerPoint, Excel, and other Office programs on a
tiny laptop with a small keyboard and a touchpad.

If you can only pick one of these, make it the external mouse – the normal laptop touchpads are
horrible for PowerPoint because their precision is too low.

Laptop keyboards are worse than external keyboards, but you can find a few systems with decent
hardware (e.g., some Razer and MSI models).

You will be more efficient with a large monitor or a dual-monitor setup than a laptop screen, but if the
screen is big enough, such as 17” (43 cm) or even 15” (38 cm), it might be fine.

We recommend the Logitech USB wireless accessories for the external keyboard and mouse.

The monitor brand does not make a huge difference, but ViewSonic is good; many other brands, such
as Acer, Dell, HP, etc., also work.

This monitor does not necessarily have to be massive – in fact, huge monitors the size of TV screens
can sometimes slow you down because you can get distracted more easily.

We tend to use 24” (61 cm) or 27” (69 cm) external monitors for PowerPoint and Excel, but something
in the 32” (81 cm) or 34” (86 cm) range could also work.

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