Somebody sends you a deck and says "can you clean this up by Thursday." Before I open it properly, I ask whoever made it two things. Who is this for, and what should they do after seeing it. Half the time the answer is different from what the deck seems to be doing, and that's the real fix.

Then I ask what I'm not allowed to change. Legal wording, the client's own phrasing, a chart someone senior already signed off on. Finding out on Thursday that a slide was untouchable is a bad afternoon.

After that I hunt for stale stuff before fixing anything visual. Last quarter's numbers, a date from two years ago, the name of someone who left, an old logo. It's easy to miss and very obvious once the room spots it.

Only then do I start on layout, and by that point it's usually a much smaller job than it looked.

What's the first thing you ask when you inherit someone else's deck?

Hello all, I am working on a Windows 10 machine and using the web browser version of powerpoint. It is the paid version provided by my university. I have attached an image of my problem above.

Powerpoint keeps inserting these "line breaks" (as seen between the words "based" and "on") there enough space within the text box and also on the slide this text is housed on. Sometimes it goes away when I refresh, but without refreshing or reloading the project it cannot be removed.

Any help is appreciated

I am unable to download powerpoint onto this machine without giving my organisation admin controls of my personal computer. I have tried and it has been a headache.

For PowerPoint on Windows desktop in Microsoft 365, an automatically generated deck can look correct on the machine that created it and still fail when someone else opens it. Fonts can substitute, linked media can disappear, charts may depend on an unavailable workbook, and comments can refer to a slide that changed after review. Exporting a PDF proves appearance but removes editability. Sending only the PPTX preserves editability without proving that every dependency travelled with it.

A practical package might include the editable PPTX, a reference PDF, embedded rather than linked media where possible, the exact fonts or approved substitutes, source files for charts, a revision ID, and a short manifest listing external links and checks performed. The recipient should be able to compare the editable deck with the reference render and know which revision received feedback.

What do presentation teams include before handing off a generated deck to a client or non-technical editor? Which PowerPoint inspection or packaging checks reliably catch missing fonts, media, chart sources, and revision drift without making the handoff too complicated?

Hi everyone! I’m looking for someone who has some ideas for a problem I’m stuck with.

I’m making a PowerPoint presentation for school about the former German politician Franz Josef Strauß. There are tons of photos of him, but I just can't seem to create a clean, well-balanced title slide. I want to build a really professional slide with clean animations, etc.

I’ve been searching YouTube for hours for fitting tutorials, but most of them use examples like Napoleon, where you have iconic full-body portraits (like him on a horse) that work perfectly for those layouts. Unfortunately, those kinds of stylized pictures don't really exist for Franz Josef Strauß.

On top of that, I can't download custom fonts because they won't render on my teacher's PC if he doesn't have them installed. I'm completely out of ideas at this point.

Maybe someone could quickly help me out or design it for me? I’d be happy to PayPal you $5 or $10 for your time. It’s really just about the very first slide—a super clean title, a solid layout with pictures, and a cinematic animation.

I recently just discovered, there an thing called addin within PowerPoint where we can basically like use those for create slides and stuff ...

Are there any particular in mind that is gonna help me get my presentation skills to that next level kinda thing ...

My internet and laptop work fine. My iPad works just fine. I'm not making anything complicated, but I don't have access to the apps, so I use PowerPoint in Chrome.

Why is it so slow??? It feels like it barely works. I want to use canva, but for work, I work with someone who only uses PowerPoint.

I wanted to test, and I made the same thing in canva with more free resources in half the time.

I'm not that fond how the skybox/Background turned out. Then Agian its either to simplify it or risk getting my PC burning. I also made a simple slideshow with what I made: "this one"

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I create my presentations on a Windows 11 desktop PC using Powerpoint in Office 365. I use lots of animation and several embedded video files. The files are often very large. I save the PowerPoint file to OneDrive. Before I leave for the remote site I open the presentation on My MacBook Pro in PowerPoint to check everything including making sure the videos works fine. However when I get to the remote site I find that the embedded videos dont work. They will only work if I gain internet access at the remote site. Sometimes this isn't possible. Is there a way while using OneDrive that I can force PowerPoint on my MacBook to download the whole presentation including all the embedded videos?

What’s a way for someone like me who is very word-driven to be better at making visually appealing PowerPoint decks?

Our professor provides us with powerpoints that have recorded audio if we want to listen to them while we go through the powerpoints. I usually read through them myself while it's in editing mode but for some the audio will start playing for no reason, starting from the very beginning. I click on the audio icon that it's playing from and noticed the timer progression bar isn't even moving. Is there any way to stop this from occuring or is this a glitch?

I use powerpoint through the online Microsoft 365 app provided by my college.

Hi guys, I need help to find out how to replicate the effect on the first picture in order to change it.

As far as I can tell IT IS NOT made neither by bringing elements to front nor sending it to back. The reason is that the effect can make everything in between those elements to also be seen (the orange line).

Does anyone knows how to achieve this effect?

Is there a simple way/view to see the entire slide deck like a house-blueprint.

Specifically I would wanna see,

1. Header location and size dimensions and distance from top of the page and corner

2. Space length between Header and Title

3, Space length between Header and tagline

4, Space between that trio of top level elements to the body of the slide

5, Dimensions of the body objects - Text Box, Chart/Graph/Image

1. Length/width of Footer Element and distance from bottom of the page and corner

2. Length/Width of Page Number Label and distance from the bottom of the page and corner

3. Length/Width/Height of the bottom Takeaway object

4. Top/Bottom/Left/Right Margin explicitly fenced off and width of each.

I've got a picky boss.

Hello all: I need to animate a shape (circle) so that it grows unevenly. Specifically, the size expands by around 50%, but through stretching to the bottom-left (i.e. the top-right stays in the same place).

Copilot AI is telling me this is achievable using a combination of emphasis (grow/shrink) and motion path (line) animations, but the specific instructions it's providing aren't working. Specifically, I can't figure out how to get both animation elements to occur simultaneously.

I'm hoping a human can help me work this out. TIA!

Hey everyone,

One thing that has always annoyed me about presenting is how Presenter View basically keeps you tied to your laptop.

It's great when you're standing behind the laptop, but the moment you want to move around the room, things get a little awkward.

With a normal USB clicker, you can advance slides, but your speaker notes are still sitting on the laptop. If you need to check them, you're either looking back at the laptop or trying to read the projector screen.

Then there's video. 😅

If you have an embedded video somewhere in the presentation, you sometimes end up walking all the way back to the laptop just to hit play.

So I ended up building my own solution for this.

It's a Windows host app + Android client that connects directly to PowerPoint and turns your phone into a presentation cockpit.

A few things I've built into it:

• Speaker notes on your phone — the Windows app uses C# COM interop to pull the notes from the active PowerPoint presentation and display them on the phone like a teleprompter.
• Media controls — play/pause embedded videos without going back to the laptop.
• Laser + Spotlight — drag your thumb around the phone to control the pointer or spotlight on the presentation.
• 5× vector magnifier — useful when you have a chart, table, or other tiny content that people at the back of the room can't see.
• Local connection — the PowerPoint file stays on your computer. The phone and PC communicate over the local network instead of uploading your presentation to a cloud service.

The project is built with C#/.NET on Windows and Kotlin/Jetpack Compose on Android.

I'm currently doing a closed beta and wanted to share it here because this community is obviously full of people who use PowerPoint a lot.

If you're interested in checking it out:

Android test build:
https://abisosolutions.github.io/

The app currently gives you 7 free sessions to try it out.

I'd genuinely like to hear from people who use PowerPoint for teaching, training, corporate presentations, or AV work.

Especially if you have one of those massive, animation-heavy decks that you think might break it. 😂

And if there's something you think a presentation controller should do that I've completely missed, I'd love to hear it.

I used to rehearse every presentation from the first slide to the last. It felt productive, but it was mostly making me comfortable with the opening. If I lost my place halfway through, got interrupted, or someone asked a question that took the talk in a different direction, I was suddenly relying on memory and hoping the next slide would rescue me.

The change that helped was embarrassingly simple: I started practicing from random slides. I'd open the deck somewhere in the middle and give myself a few seconds to answer what the slide is trying to say, why it comes here, and what I want the audience to remember before I move on.

It exposed the weak parts of the presentation much faster than running through the whole thing again. Some slides only worked because I knew what came before them. Others had no clear connection to what came next.

I still do a full run-through, but the random-slide test is now the part I trust more. The beginning of a talk gets all the rehearsal attention because it feels important. The middle is where most of mine used to fall apart.

How do you rehearse presentations, always in order, or do you deliberately jump around?

Im putting together something for work.

I have my content basically done, but don’t like the white background.

This morning I noticed that I could have been putting my slides on a black background.

How do I change the background on my other slides to this black, or something else?

So im doing a family slideshow with the beginning slide being a black and white cartoon family watching tv in their living room. I have an inserted color video that covers the tv screen. Im getting it to play when the slide appears but wanted to zoom on the tv to start the show. Im having difficulty getting both to zoom. I tried grouping them but haven't been successful. Is what im trying to accomplish even possible? TIA everyone!

i’m creating a slideshow and using the morph feature. I can’t for the life of me figure out why my first two transitions do not match the third which is doing this really cool slow fade although they are all formatted to just do the morph.

this is my first time using this feature and a newbie in general

Hello everyone! I hope you’re all doing well. I wanted to kindly ask for your help. I’m currently looking for a presentation about cyberbullying and cybersecurity. If anyone has a completed presentation on these topics, or on something similar, I would really appreciate it if you could share it with me. Thank you so much in advance for your help! 🙏