A section is a named group of consecutive slides. You add one at the currently selected slide, and every slide from there to the next section boundary belongs to it. Collapse a section in the thumbnail rail or the Slide Sorter and its slides fold into a single header line with a count. Drag the header and the whole group moves together. Print a section and only its slides print.
Worked example: a 34-slide investor update
You can measure why sections matter. Go back to the 34-slide investor update from the opening. Tag each slide with its topic and count how often the topic changes between adjacent slides: 30 changes across 33 adjacent pairs, a switch rate of 0.9091. The longest unbroken run on a single topic is 2 slides. A reader moving through that deck re-orients on almost every page, and re-orientation is the cost that makes a long deck feel longer than it is.
Group the same slides into Cover, Business, Financials, Product and Asks, keeping every slide's content untouched, and the switch count falls to 4, a reduction of 26 switches or 86.67%. The work required is 18 slides moved, which is 52.94% of the deck, because a longest non-decreasing run of 16 slides was already in an order consistent with the new grouping. Nothing was written, rewritten or deleted.
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How do you use sections well?
Where you put the boundaries is a judgement call, but one rule settles most cases. A section is a claim group, not a chapter heading. If you can't say what the section argues in a single clause, it's only a container. The fix is usually to merge it with its neighbour. Five sections in a thirty-slide deck is comfortable. Twelve sections in a thirty-slide deck means the sections are doing the work of slide titles.
Sections also survive things that slide order doesn't. Insert four slides in the middle of a sectioned deck and they fall inside a named group, so the structure absorbs them. Insert four slides into an unsectioned deck and the only record of where they belong is your memory of what you were doing. When two people work on the same file, sections are the cheapest possible coordination device, because "take the Financials section" is an instruction that survives someone else adding three slides to Business.
One habit heads off the commonest failure. Name a section for its claim, not its department. "Unit economics turned positive in Q2" is a section name that tells a co-author what belongs in it. "Financials" is a name that will accept anything with a number on it, which is how a six-slide section becomes a thirteen-slide section over two weeks.