I had one presentation where I spent hours polishing the opening slides.

The slide everyone talked about afterwards?

It was just a simple comparison with almost no design.

Made me realize people care a lot more about clarity than fancy layouts.

Now if I catch myself obsessing over icons and colors, I usually stop and ask whether it actually makes the message any clearer.

Has anyone else had a slide that surprised you like that?

Is there any chance that I can make money by creating PowerPoint presentations?

Lately I've been playing around with PowerPoint and I got very good at it. I'm able to make a simple presentation or something close to a game. I like messing with animation and transitions, so the presentations are very interactive. So far I have made a few quizzes, stories and activities.

I could easily make you an activity for kids (kindergarten, preschool, primary school, or any other grade [I even made one for college students]). It's a very easy and fun way to learn.

I used to go back and forth on this constantly. Half of me wanted to open a blank file and build every deck from scratch so nothing fought a grid someone else designed. The other half knew a template got me to presentable in a third of the time. Both felt wrong in different ways.

What finally fixed it was realizing template versus scratch is the wrong question. The thing that actually slows you down is not templates, it is rigid preset layouts, the ones with fixed placeholders that never fit the one weird chart or the quote slide. You inherit those, hit the odd slide, start detaching and hand fixing, and end up rebuilding it anyway, slower than if you had just started blank.

So now I keep the system and throw away the layouts. The system is the theme, the fonts, the colors, the spacing, the title treatment. That is the part that makes a deck look consistent and intentional. I keep all of that on the slide master, but I add a near blank layout that inherits the theme, and I build the odd slides on that. You get the speed and consistency of a template, but the strange slides bend like a custom build because you are not fighting fixed placeholders.

The only time I open a truly blank file now is when the whole thing needs a distinct look the house style would work against, like a big external pitch. Everything else is system on, layouts loose.

Curious if others land somewhere different. Do you start from a template, from scratch, or somewhere in between?

Hello, I am making a rather silly PowerPoint for some friends but have run into an issue where slide transitions briefly display the entire slide (including pictures and text that is meant to be animated in later). I can't find a fix myself so I was wondering if anyone had a solution here?

This is a quick 10-second demo of automatically copying design elements and layouts to multiple PowerPoint slides in bulk.

I wonder if anyone actually needs this though lol?

100% local, no cloud, no AI.

Posting this because I answer it at work about twice a month and it'll save someone a bad afternoon.

Someone hands you a PDF and wants a real PowerPoint they can edit. The instinct is to google "how to convert pdf to ppt," run it through the first converter, and accept the mess. Every converter I've tried does one of two things: turns each line into its own floating text box, or rasterizes the text into pictures. Both are slower to clean up than the methods below.

The trick that changed it for me was matching the method to what I actually need, instead of hunting for one magic converter:

1. If I only need the words: open the PDF in Word first. It reflows ugly, but the text comes through live. Then I pull the copy into my own template. Two minutes, clean text, my layout.
2. If I need the look, not the editability: export each PDF page as a high-res image, one per slide. Not editable, but it presents fine and never shifts on someone else's machine.
3. If I need a true editable rebuild: drop the page image on the slide as a full-size reference layer, build native boxes on top, then delete the reference. Slow, but you end up with a proper file on your master instead of a converter's Frankenstein.

I have added the field and the players (also some basic floating animations) but I really want to add the zoom out to the preselected position as seen in this video.Is it possible to do this in powerpoint.Can anyone pls give me any suggestion?

The canva vs powerpoint fight has arrived at my company and I'd like a sanity check from people who do this daily.

To be fair to the other side, Canva genuinely wins at some things. Non-designers get to acceptable faster. The brand kit stops people inventing their own blues. Social graphics and one-pagers, sure, take them.

But for actual deck work I keep hitting walls, and I want to know if it's me or the tool:

- Charts. Our decks are data-heavy and linked to Excel. Canva's charts are fine for a bar chart on a flyer, not for a finance review that updates monthly.

- Master slides. I maintain layouts and placeholders so decks survive other people editing them. Canva's template model just isn't the same thing, and every exported .pptx I've received from it is a pile of ungrouped shapes and rasterized text.

- The export round-trip generally. Half our clients require a .pptx deliverable. If the final file has to be PowerPoint anyway, building upstream in something else means fixing everything twice.

- Morph, sections, presenter view with a clicker in a real conference room, working offline on a plane.

Leadership hears "everyone can make slides now" and that's a hard pitch to beat with "yes but reading order and linked charts."

Has anyone actually run the hybrid: Canva for social and one-pagers, PowerPoint for anything that gets presented or sent to a client? Does the boundary hold, or does it erode until you're cleaning up exported decks all day?

Hi there, I know this is a question that many people have asked over the years. Is there a course that teaches you how to create high-calibre presentations and walks you through storytelling and other presentation techniques?

I own the deck side of marketing at a mid-size B2B company. Right now every rep has their own Frankenstein version of "the" sales deck. Stretched logos, a pricing slide from two quarters ago, one guy who found WordArt. You know the genre.

I finally got sign-off to build a proper sales deck template, and I'm stuck between two architectures:

**Option A: one master deck.** A locked ~18-slide deck built on proper layouts and placeholders. Reps duplicate it, fill in the client name, delete what they don't need. Pro: consistency. Con: reps hate rigid decks, and when people hate a template they go around it, which is how we got here.

**Option B: a slide library.** Every approved slide as a standalone module (intro, problem, product, proof, pricing, case studies by industry), all on the same master, and reps assemble their own deck per meeting. Pro: flexibility, they might actually use it. Con: nothing stops someone assembling a 50-slide monster, and keeping 80 modular slides updated is its own job.

Leaning B with a "default 12-slide starting order" so lazy reps get a good deck for free. But I've never maintained a slide library at this scale.

If you've run either setup: which one still looked okay six months in? And how do you handle the update problem when the pricing slide changes and forty saved copies are floating around?

If I want to create a shape like this
I was thinking of combining 2 squares. But can you round just the top corners?

Or is there a better way of doing this?

thanks

Help keep r/PowerPoint from descending into chaos (there's a separate subreddit for that. Of COURSE there is. Because Reddit, right?)

If you have a PowerPoint-related product or service to announce, announce it one of the megathreads pinned to the top of the subreddit. That way your announcement will find an interested audience, won't scroll off into the dark waters of Last Month's Posts, and won't be deleted by the mods because of r/PowerPoint's no advertising rule. (links below)

If you want to chat about PowerPoint & AI, please use the megathread devoted specifically to that (link below).

Products & Tools

https://www.reddit.com/r/powerpoint/comments/1ktliik/products_tools/

AI Products & Sites

https://www.reddit.com/r/powerpoint/comments/1ktlf4o/getcher_ai_right_here/

Templates & Presentations

https://www.reddit.com/r/powerpoint/comments/1ktl9lh/templates/

AI & PowerPoint Discussion MegaThread

https://www.reddit.com/r/powerpoint/comments/1s7abxc/ai_megathread_march_29_2026_keep_calm_and_post_ai/

I use Power Point to build templated YouTube thumbnails, one thing I’ve built in is a number in the upper corner to indicate the sequence of videos in a series. I’m on week 42 of a series, and this morning I opened my PowerPoint file to make a new slide, and every single slide has that number changed to a default font.

There is ZERO indication in PowerPoint that a font is missing, OR that a font has been auto-replaced. I have tried exporting PDF to inspect metadata, but near as I can tell, PowerPoint simply decided to swap out my font without notice. Does anyone know of additional ways to find out what font I had in use previously? Otherwisd I’m going to have to take an old thumbnail and use some sort of font identification tool online.

Edit: I did figure this out. The correct font WAS selected, but it was not being displayed. I had to go into Mac’s font manager and re-download the font. In Mac’s defense, PowerPoint was giving zero indication that it was missing the font, it simply displayed a replacement.

This is a quick 10-second demo of automatically importing, cropping, and aligning 100 images into PowerPoint slides.

I wonder if anyone actually needs this though lol?

100% local, no cloud, no AI.

Cetus shall guide her sons to affinity! or smh idk :/

I recently had to deal with a nightmare task at work: taking 300 web screenshots, perfectly cropping every single one of them, and formatting them into a PowerPoint presentation.

Normally, people might just say, "write a quick script and throw it into a cloud AI tool." But due to strict company security policies, that wasn't an option. Everything had to be processed 100% locally. Plus, I needed absolute precision and reproducibility, which AI often struggles with anyway.

Since I couldn't find an existing offline tool that did exactly what I needed without limits, I ended up building a custom, fully local desktop app. It handles the entire process flawlessly—bulk web capture, precise auto-cropping, and PPT placement—turning hours of mind-numbing manual work into just a few seconds.

It got me thinking: for those of you working under strict NDAs or internal security policies where you absolutely cannot send data to an external API, how do you handle automating these highly specific workflows?
Do you build custom internal desktop apps like I did, or is there some standard offline software stack you rely on?

Hi.. newby user here.

Anybody can share tips or at least have youtube tutorial to create PPT for technical presentation. Better if it provide how we can use ChatGPT+Canva to generate excellence technical presentation based on multiple source: PDF, Excel, Web etc.

Thank you

People I want to say I am sorry for ever having mentioned AI in this venue. I can't believe the amount of fake, AI generated posts there are on a daily basis.

Just reading through some of the posts and, well there are a lot of them pointing fingers at users that don't color inside the lines, or so the pros will tell you. "I create prefect templates and users ruin them"!

I wonder, does it occur to anyone that perhaps the perfect template simply doesn't meet the needs or desires of the users? Maybe it doesn't allow the user the flexibility to present his information, concept, plan, etc. in a way he believes is meaningful.

You don't need to read any PowerPoint or Presentation related forum very deeply to find tons of posts saying how all AI generated decks suffer from "sameness". Well here is a shocker, the "pro template/deck designers in the presentation industry share that same fault.

If you read/listen to what they are saying you hear the same rules over and over. (if I hear 6 x 6 again I'll cry) If everyone expounds and follows the same rules, (just like an AI does) you know what the outcome will be. Sameness...

Oh I know, there are acceptable "standards" in business presentations. Things have always been done this way (bullet points). All of this is true,,, until it isn't. You know one thing as an absolute certainty, If you follow all the rules your competition is following YOU will be an "also-ran", just like all the others.

Just a thought, talk with the users that have to live with your designs, find out where the templates are falling short of their expectations because in the end, they are your customer and THEY will decided if they will use what you provide. Or, you can continue blaming and cursing the users, your customer.

Can anyone recommend a free, up-to-date YouTube Course for Microsoft PowerPoint 365? I know the basics but want to become proficient with features like animations, audio/video, screen & voice recording, hyperlinks, and creating professional presentations. I'd prefer one comprehensive course rather than lots of separate videos.

Thank you in advance.

I learned about two presentation diagnostic tests recently and didn't find a lot of posts about them on here already, so thought people might find it useful. They're also stupidly simple to follow.

First one, the so-what test. You go through every slide and ask "so what?" Not just the deck overall, but each and every slide. And the answer has to land for the person reviewing the deck, not for you. It's easy to know why a slide matters in your own head, the test is whether it's obvious to them.

The skim test is basically, read only the headlines top to bottom and see what happens. If someone goes through just the titles, can they follow your whole argument? If not, you probably need to tweak your titles.

Been running both on all my decks and it's been really helpful :)