In general, this disclosure describes techniques that employ user-defined values of properties of sections of an electronic presentation. As described herein, a user may configure a presentation to include a plurality of sections. Each of the sections includes zero or more slides of the electronic slide presentation. In addition to the slides associated with each section, each of the sections is associated with one or more properties having values that can be defined by an author of the presentation. Because the values of the properties of the sections are user-definable, these properties may, in some implementations of these techniques, enable the author of the presentation to use the sections in ways not possible in presentation applications that merely use sections as a means of grouping thumbnail images of slides for navigation among slides in an authoring interface.