How to Undo in PowerPoint

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Anyone can make mistakes, and rather than starting from scratch, we can easily learn how to undo in PowerPoint to get back to the previous stage we were working on. The undo feature in PowerPoint can be accessed through two different methods, which we shall explain in this guide.

How to Undo in PowerPoint via Shortcut

The first method is also the quickest once you gain mastery of PowerPoint shortcuts. To undo any kind of action, like editing text, working with shapes, format options, and so on, just hit this keystroke combination: CTRL + Z (For Mac users, CMD + Z).

That will revert the change you just made, and you can repeat this keyboard shortcut 20 times. After that, if you didn’t save the document before, you won’t be able to revert without losing all changes. There’s an alternative method to prevent this from happening.

We can work with the PowerPoint configurations to increase the maximum count of undo in PowerPoint. To access that option, go to File > Options > Advanced. Locate the Maximum number of undos option, and increase the value. The maximum allowed value is 150 – please beware that increasing that number implies more RAM allocation for PowerPoint when running to preserve the previous states of your file. As a result, unexpected crashes may happen, but the most common outcome is PowerPoint running slower.

Maximum count of undos option in PowerPoint

How to Undo in PowerPoint via Top Menu

Another option we have is to undo from the top menu in PowerPoint. This can be accessed by clicking the circular arrow pointing to the left.

How to undo in PowerPoint via top menu

If we click on the tiny arrow next to it, you open the history of undos available in PowerPoint. You can select any action you want to undo, which saves time instead of going one by one (remember, all changes made after the point you selected will be undone.

Undo history in PowerPoint

How to Redo in PowerPoint

We’ve seen how to undo in PowerPoint via two methods. Well, you can redo the changes by applying the opposite of each of those methods. Let’s see them in detail.

To redo via shortcut in PowerPoint, you need to hit the keyboard shortcut CTRL + Y (CMD + Y for Mac Users). To undo in PowerPoint via the Top Menu, click on the curved arrow pointing to the right.

How to redo in PowerPoint

Final Words

And that’s all. It’s something pretty straightforward to master, guaranteeing a safer working environment for your presentations. We highly advise you to opt for the shortcut version as it’s faster. 

Microsoft PowerPoint, PowerPoint Tips
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