How to Start a PowerPoint Presentation from the Current Slide (Shift+F5)

Shift+F5 (Fn+Shift+F5 on many Mac keyboards, or Cmd+Return as an alternative) jumps into full-screen presentation mode starting from whatever slide the editor currently has open, sidestepping the plain-F5 behavior of always restarting the whole deck from slide one. **Why this matters during rehearsal**: when you're practicing or fine-tuning a specific section of a deck, replaying the entire presentation from the beginning every time you want to check how slide 14 looks live wastes significant time, especially in long decks. Click slide 14 in the panel, press Shift+F5, and you're immediately in presentation mode at exactly that slide, ready to check animations, timing, or layout at full-screen scale. **Speaker notes and Presenter View**: starting from the current slide still brings up Presenter View on a connected second display (or your primary display, configurable in Slide Show Setup) exactly as a full F5 launch would, including speaker notes, a timer, and the next-slide preview — none of that functionality is lost by starting partway through. **A common confusion**: some presenters assume Shift+F5 starts a 'rehearsal mode' that's somehow different from a real presentation, but it's the identical full presentation mode — the only difference from F5 is the starting slide. Any embedded video autoplay, animation triggers, or slide timers behave exactly as they would in a full run-through. **Combining with slide jumping**: once inside presentation mode, you can still type any slide number and press Enter to jump elsewhere in the deck, so starting from the current slide isn't a hard constraint — it's just a faster starting point than always beginning at slide one and clicking through everything before the section you actually want to check. **Related shortcuts**: F5 alone for a full run-through from the beginning, which is what you want before any real audience-facing presentation to confirm the entire deck flows correctly from start to finish, including any object animations that only trigger once per uninterrupted run. **Mistake to avoid**: some presenters press Shift+F5 believing it will also silently reset any advance timers or automatic transitions to start counting from zero at the new starting slide — it does not. If a slide further into the deck was set to auto-advance after fifteen seconds based on its position in a full run, starting from it directly with Shift+F5 applies that same fifteen-second timer starting now, which is usually what you want, but can catch you off guard if you were expecting to linger on that slide indefinitely to answer questions before advancing manually. **Rehearsing a specific mid-deck section repeatedly**: a common technique when polishing a single tricky segment — say, three slides in the middle of a technical demo — is to click the first of those three slides, hit Shift+F5, run through just that segment, press Escape to exit, click the same starting slide again, and repeat. This tight loop lets you iterate on timing and delivery for one section dozens of times in the time it would take to run the full deck from the beginning even a handful of times. **Multiple monitors and testing display assignment**: if your Presenter View setup seems to show the wrong content on the wrong screen (audience view on your laptop, notes on the projector), test this by using Shift+F5 rather than a full F5 run, since you can quickly back out with Escape and adjust Slide Show Setup's display assignment without having to restart from slide one each time you retest the configuration.