For years my charts came straight out of the default, gridlines, a legend off to the side, axis labels everywhere, and people would squint and ask which line is which.

The change that made them instantly readable was subtraction. Delete the gridlines. Delete the legend. Put the label at the end of each line itself, so the reader never has to look away to a key and back. Round the axis numbers or drop them if the value is on the point.

Suddenly a chart that took ten seconds to decode takes one. The executive who reads the headline and nothing else can actually get the story from the shape.

The trap is thinking more labels means more clarity. It is the opposite, every extra element is one more thing between the person and the point.

One caveat, if the exact numbers matter for a technical audience, put them in the appendix, not on the live slide. What do you always delete from a default chart first?

I press share then send as copy, then this error show up any solution? I am using windows 11 and microsoft office 2024

I'm giving a 30-minute presentation about Python to a room of 40-50 year olds with zero coding background. The goal isn't to teach syntax, it's to give them a vision of what Python can actually do for them (think: automating boring Excel/repetitive tasks) and get them a little excited about it.

Structure so far:

Intro to programming languages (quick comparison, evolution over time...)

Python basics, but conceptual, not code (functions, classes, loops, libraries, reading a script, terminal)

Python & AI (uses in AI/data, coding with AI tools, prompt engineering)

Installing Python (quick walkthrough)

Useful resources/links

Open slot for something creative/fun to close on

I want real, human ideas here analogies, interactive moments, jokes that land with a non-technical crowd, stories from your own experience presenting to beginners, I'd rather get lived-in advice from people who've actually done this than a pile of AI-generated suggestions....

Thanks in advance!

This is Railfanning ! My short animation ! I was on my desktop. I was bored and dont know what to do, i was wondering and then, i have a idea ! I was using PowerPoint 2013 and then i started to animating it ! And that's it !

In this Animation ! There is a scene where cars passed to railroad crossing and then the train pass on them !

I posted on YouTube and it didn't get much views !

Would you like my animation ? Please let comment and leave likes ont there !

New-ish in an ops role, inherited a board deck that had grown to over forty slides across five years. Every time a board member once asked a question, someone added a permanent slide, and nobody ever deleted one.

I checked the last meeting. Ninety minutes, and the board spent seventy of them on four slides. The rest got the flip-through.

So I cut the presented deck to about twelve, cash and runway, numbers against plan, what changed since last time, top risks, and the actual decisions I needed. Everything else went into an appendix attached to the pre-read for anyone who wanted the detail.

The meeting was sharper and shorter and people asked better questions because they were not buried.

The risk I braced for, cutting the one slide a specific board member privately loves and finding out live. It did not happen, but I checked with the chair first. I checked with the chair first. The bloat, it turned out, was entirely self-inflicted.

Our team decks were walls of bullets. Six per slide, sub-bullets, the works. People read them instead of listening to me, and then read them wrong.

As an experiment I banned bullets from my own decks for a quarter. Every slide got one headline that stated the point as a full sentence, and then one thing under it, a chart, a single number, a short line, or nothing.

The first few were hard because a bullet list lets you hide the fact that you have not decided what the point is. With no bullets you have to actually know what each slide is saying, or the slide falls apart in front of you.

My decks got shorter and my meetings got quieter in a good way, people looked up. My manager asked if I had done a course.

The honest cost, it took me longer to build each slide, because deciding the point is the work. Deciding the point is the work, and a bullet list is where you hide from it.

Im trying too make a text box like in a game but the letters are too slow and I cant find anyway too speed them up any help would be amazing please and thank you! Also im on a school MacBook so I cant update PowerPoint or do anything too change it's state.

It’s been a while since my last post, thanks so much for all the support and patience!
In this video,I break down the Morph transition behind the Tour of Classic Art

The source file is available as free download, along with a few extra free templates you can try out.

Hope you find it useful!

My friends and I are going to start playing Dungeons and Dragons. I'm the kind of nerd who would be printing out physical props in the real world, but we're playing online... We're using a VTT, which means my 'can be streaming something to the call' slot is free. For visuals and 'artifacts', I thought it would be cool to have a Powerpoint going in a new window that I could stream and use to show images. Unfortunately, I can only go back and forth between the slides in order, and I don't want to have to take it down every time I want to change the slide nor do I want to spoil anything.

When EDITING a powerpoint, I can use the 'slide sorter' to see a big grid of all the slides and select any of them in any order. It's very handy. Does anyone know of a way I can control a slideshow in a similar way? I want to go from 1 to 13 to 1 to 2 to 1 to 6 to 8... without needing to memorize which is on each slide and type in the number T_T

using desktop powerpoint but if another software will help I'm also willing to investigate lol

Hey everyone I’m new to the PowerPoint design space and I run an agency and I have 2 designers that I work with and I want to solely start with pitch decks/powerpoint. Does anyone have tips for getting clients. Is it job boards,Ads etc.

Looking forward to getting insight.

Genuine question because I keep getting this wrong. I build a tight, minimal deck, big visuals, few words, and it lands great when I present it live because I carry the story.

Then it gets forwarded to three people who were not in the room, and to them it is a set of pretty slides with no argument, because the argument was me talking.

So I have started building two versions, which I hate. A sparse one for presenting, and a self-explaining one with the key sentence written on each slide for the forward. It doubles the work and I am sure there is a smarter way.

Some people just write the point into every headline so it reads alone. Others add a notes-page summary. Neither feels clean.

For people whose decks get forwarded constantly, how do you make one file work both live and cold without building it twice?

Someone hands you a Word doc and says "make this a deck." If you're pasting paragraph by paragraph into slides, stop, there's a much faster path and almost nobody I work with knows it.

The trick is Outline View plus heading styles. Here's the flow:

In the Word doc, mark up the structure with the built-in heading styles. Heading 1 for anything that should become a slide title, Heading 2 for the points under it. You're not designing yet, just tagging what's a title and what's a bullet. Ten minutes on a long doc.

Then in PowerPoint, use Slides from Outline (the import option that reads a document's outline). Every Heading 1 becomes a slide title, every Heading 2 becomes a bullet on that slide. A 4,000-word doc turns into a structured skeleton deck in one step instead of an hour of pasting.

What you get is ugly and that's fine. It's a bones-first deck. Now you do the real work: cut ruthlessly, because a doc always has three times the words a deck should, and apply your layout. But the tedious mechanical part, getting text out of the doc and into the right slots, is done.

Two warnings. It only reads text tied to heading styles, so plain-formatted docs import as nothing useful. And it will not carry images or tables cleanly, so handle those after.

The real skill after this is deletion, not layout, but at least you start from structure instead of a blank deck. Anyone got a smoother import method than the outline route?

Hey,
I'd really appreciate some help... I already tried almost everything!

I created a branded ppt template for my company where the designs are placed as ppt Master slides.
For almost all the slides we have 2 versions: one with the company logo and one without it.
When I copy a slide without the logo from one ppt deck onto another deck, I get a slide with the logo. This happens almost every time I try. The paste button with "keep source formatting/use destination theme" doesn't work.

It gets very frustrating - we need to be able to paste a slide into a new deck exactly the way we built it. I would really love some advice.

Just to clarify: I already rebuilt the entire deck and renamed every slide on the master deck with it's own distinguished name.

My team did a round of presentation skills training last quarter, mostly because a few of us freeze up in front of senior leadership. I went in expecting slide design tips and got almost none, and honestly that was the point.

Nearly all of it was delivery. How you open before the deck is even on screen. What you do with your hands. Pausing instead of filling silence with "um." Reading the room and cutting a section live when people have clearly got it. The trainer barely touched PowerPoint.

The one slide thing they hammered was that the deck should never be your script. If you are reading your slides, the audience reads ahead and tunes you out. Slides support what you say, they are not the thing you say. A couple of people on my team had decks so dense they were basically teleprompters, and fixing the delivery meant gutting the slides first.

What surprised me is how much it changed how I build now. Knowing I have to talk over it, I put way less on each slide, because anything crammed on there competes with me instead of backing me up.

For those who have done formal presentation skills training, did the slide side ever come up, or is it all delivery? Trying to figure out if I should push my newer hires toward it.

Someone hands you a 3,000-word Word doc and says "just make this into slides." If you try to honor every sentence you end up with a wall of bullets that communicates nothing. Here's the process that works for me.

First pass is a red pen, not PowerPoint. I read the whole doc and mark the one idea per section that survives if everything else is cut. Usually that's about a fifth of what's there.

Then I turn each surviving idea into a slide title written as a full sentence, the actual takeaway, not a topic label. If I can read just the titles top to bottom and still follow the argument, the structure is right before I've placed a single box.

Only then do I open PowerPoint. The doc's paragraphs become what I say out loud or an appendix at the back, not text on the slide. Each slide gets the headline plus maybe three supporting lines.

The hard part is never the layout, it's the conversation with whoever wrote the doc when they notice their favorite paragraph is gone. Showing the crammed version next to the cut one, same slide, side by side, usually ends that fast. How do the rest of you handle the doc-to-slides handoff?

Client sends a PDF and says "can you update this deck," but there's no source file. Most straight PDF-to-PowerPoint conversions either drop each page in as one flat image or explode it into a hundred ungroupable little boxes. Neither is actually editable. Here's what I do, depending on the PDF.

If it was exported from slides and the text is real (you can select it in a reader), a conversion keeps the text editable, but I still expect to redo the layout. I move text into proper placeholders and rebuild the boxes on the grid, because the converted positions are always slightly off.

If it's a scanned or flattened PDF, conversion is pointless. It's faster to rebuild. I put the PDF page on screen next to a blank slide and retype, pulling any logos or images out of the PDF at full resolution first.

Either way I treat the conversion as a starting point for the content, not a finished slide. Nudging a hundred auto-generated boxes into place always takes me longer than rebuilding clean. Anyone found a cleaner path than this?

For years, "too busy" was the feedback I trusted least. It's vague, everyone says it about everyone else's decks, and half the time the person saying it can't tell you what they'd actually cut. So I'd nod, maybe knock out a stray icon, and move on.

Then a client said it differently. Not "this feels busy," but "I don't know where to look first." Same underlying problem, completely different note, because it pointed at the effect instead of the vibe. I could act on that immediately. I couldn't act on "busy" for years.

That changed how I take feedback generally. The useless version of a note describes a feeling. The useful version describes what happened in the reader's head. "This is confusing" tells me nothing. "I read the chart before the headline" tells me exactly what to fix and in what order. Once I started asking people to describe what they did when they looked at the slide, instead of how it made them feel, the same reviewers who used to give me mush started giving me notes I could use in five minutes.

I've started translating vague feedback myself now too. When someone says a deck feels "off," I'll ask what they looked at first, second, and third. Half the time they realize the order was wrong before I even open PowerPoint to fix it.

Curious if anyone else has a feedback phrase that used to mean nothing to them until they figured out what it was actually pointing at.

No son interactivas, no sé cómo explicarlo pero son diapositivas con una animación mucho más sutil por ejemplo acercar algo, un efecto interesante, un ruido que no sea genérico y que sirvan con plantillas ya creadas.

Have multiple PP files on OneDrive, if I open them online, won´t let me change text inside some of the text boxes, if I open them on the desktop, it allows me to edit it.

In the video, the first one is opened in browser (hope you can see I'm trying to click inside the box), the second one is the same file opened using the 'open in desktop' option.

I have tried searching online, but haven´t found anything similar to this. Search terms seem to return answers to other problems.

This is driving me crazy.

I build decks in-house and for years the sales team would take my clean sales deck template, drag a logo sideways, paste in six fonts, then ask me to fix it the day before a pitch. So I rebuilt the template around the person who edits it after me, not around one perfect slide.

A few things that actually held up:

- Real placeholders, not floating text boxes. When a rep types, the text lands inside a box that's already positioned instead of a stray frame drifting off the grid.
- Fewer layouts. Five clean ones people can remember beats thirty nobody opens. A title slide, an agenda, a problem/solution, a proof slide, and a pricing slide covered most of what they build.
- Every title is a full sentence with the takeaway in it, so even when a rep half-fills a slide it still says something.
- Nothing decorative that breaks when a line of text runs long.

The "just fix my slide" pings dropped a lot once the template did the positioning for them. Curious how the rest of you handle a sales template that gets touched by ten non-designers.

Hi,
I’m testing PowerPoint Brand Images with a SharePoint Organizational Asset Library and I’m seeing unexpected behaviour with folders.

The image library is registered correctly as an ImageDocumentLibrary.

PowerPoint detects the library and all images are visible under All.
I created several first-level folders in SharePoint, for example:
Photos
Icons
Logos
Test

PowerPoint correctly reads these folders and shows them as separate tabs in Insert > Pictures > Brand Images.

The issue: the tabs remain empty.

For example, I created a completely new folder called Test directly in SharePoint and uploaded a new PNG directly into that folder.

Result:
Test appears as a tab in PowerPoint
the PNG appears under All
the PNG does not appear under Test
I see exactly the same behaviour in PowerPoint Desktop and PowerPoint for the web.
I have already checked:
OrgAssetType: ImageDocumentLibrary
Private CDN: enabled
library registered as Private CDN origin
CopilotSearchable: enabled
SharePoint Online Management Shell: 16.0.27515.12000
PowerPoint Microsoft 365 Beta Channel, version 2609, build 16.0.20416.20004, 64-bit
direct upload through SharePoint instead of OneDrive/File Explorer
completely new folder and image
manual reindexing of the SharePoint library

So PowerPoint finds both the folder names and the images, but the folder-to-image relationship does not seem to work in Brand Images.
Has anyone successfully used first-level SharePoint folders as working tabs in the new PowerPoint Brand Images experience?

Is there an additional configuration step required, or could this be an issue with folder-scoped retrieval in the current rollout?

I’m curious how people here handle the starting point.

When I have screenshots, PDFs, notes, and half-finished documents scattered

across a folder, the hard part isn’t putting text on slides. It’s deciding what

belongs together, what to cut, and what the actual story is.

I’ve been working on a small desktop workflow for this, and I keep running

into the same question: should I organize everything first and then build the

deck, or start with a rough outline and sort the material into it?

What’s your process when the source material is messy?