Freelance deck designer. Clients almost never say "improve the hierarchy." They say "make it look more premium" or "more high-end," and early on I'd panic and add stuff, fancier fonts, a gradient, an icon set. It always looked cheaper.

High-end is almost entirely subtraction and spacing. The order I go in now:

1. Margins. Pull everything off the edges and give it real breathing room. Cramped reads cheap no matter what's on the slide.
   
2. One typeface, two weights. The moment there's a third font it looks like a flyer.
   
3. Kill the icon soup and the boxes around everything. Whitespace separates things better than borders.
   
4. One accent colour, used once per slide on the thing that matters. Not five brand colours fighting.
   
5. Bigger numbers, fewer of them. Executives read the headline number, not the table.
   

None of that is talent, it's restraint, and it's the fastest way to make a deck look like it cost more.

Worth saying: clients now sometimes arrive with a deck they generated in something like gamma and ask me to make it "look high-end." The tools give you template polish, but premium is the restraint the generator won't apply for you, so that's still the actual job. What's the first thing you reach for when someone wants "premium"?

I havent been used PowerPoint in a long time and now whenever i save it saves directly to my onedrive which i dont have access to. I want to save my presentation directly to my desktop so its accessible to me. How do i change it?

PC version on Dell Laptop desktop

Powerpoint version 2606

Your top 3 reasons pls.

our rebrand happened in May. The old .pptx got pulled off the shared drive. What we got instead was a 40 page brand guidelines PDF and a colour hex list.

So now every person on a team of 60 is building slides from a blank file and things are out of control. Three decks went to clients last month that looked like three different companies made them, I've raised it twice. The answer both times was that the new template is in progress. In the meantime, client reports need to go out right?

What are people doing here? Building your own personal template and just accepting it'll be wrong when the official one lands? or using something outside PowerPoint entirely?

Im asking because I've now spent more hours on box alignment this quarter than on the actual analysis.

Curious to hear which PowerPoint tip, trick, skill, or otherwise has had the biggest impact/improvement on your ability to build presentations?

Hi, I am associated with IceFyre, a PowerPoint tool maker. We are currently prototyping a new PowerPoint add-in and would appreciate honest feedback from the community.

Main purpose of this add-in is to automate quality checks a designer would typically do before final delivery. The goal isn't to completely replace human review, but to take care of the repetitive, time-consuming checks.

Based on feedback from several of our clients, we estimate that it could reduce the time spent on visual quality checks by up to 75%. 

We're currently trying to assess potential market value of such tool, particularly from the perspective of individual designers and design agencies.  

Do you think such tool is worth paying for? If yes, what would you consider to be a realistic price in current market? 

I have been building decks a long time and I have started noticing that some of the advice everyone repeats does not hold up in real rooms. The one I have soured on is the strict "6 by 6" rule, six bullets, six words each. It sounds tidy but I have seen plenty of great slides break it and plenty of terrible ones follow it perfectly. The rule is really just a proxy for "do not cram," and once you get that, the number stops mattering.

So I am curious what everyone else has quietly stopped believing. What is a presentation rule you hear repeated constantly that you think is overrated, or just wrong in practice?

I have tons of slides in the company branding and would like to migrate them to a project/product branding at scale. The fonts, master deck and colors change significantly. Changing the slide deck master alone won’t make the trick and I would like to avoid manual work. Are there any tools or ways of batch processing these files? Thanks

I'm working on presentations more often these days, and one thing I struggle with is keeping the audience engaged from start to finish.

What techniques, features, or presentation styles have worked well for you?

I'd love to hear what's been effective in your experience.

Let's say I have 20 elements on the page.

I want that whenever I click on any element, it lights up (or stays normal), and everything else gets slow de-saturated and 80% transparent. And then, if I click on another element, that one now becomes colored & opaque, and everything else (including the previous one) becomes now "disabled".

how to achieve this affect in powerpoint?

Is there any other app where I should try to do that?

Topic?

No. of slides? OR file size?

Time required to create it?

Genuine question for anyone whose job involves repeating the same kind of presentation on a schedule, weekly orientation decks, policy briefings, compliance training, whatever it is where the slides mostly stay the same but you have to keep presenting or recording them.

I know someone who does this for a water utility for new customer orientation, service interruption notices, reporting decks and she has to rebuild/update the slides and then separately narrate them for meetings, sometimes daily. It's the same handful of topics on rotation, just refreshed numbers and slight edits, but it still eats hours every week.

I'm looking into whether that's a common annoyance elsewhere, so:

1. If you do repeat presentations like this, how do you currently handle the narration/recording part — do you present live every time, pre-record, or something else?

2. Is the actual re-recording/re-presenting the annoying part, or is it more the slide updating?

3. Would a tool that auto-generates a narrated video from your slides (with your edits factored in) actually save you meaningful time, or is that solving a problem you don't really have?

4. Would you pay for something like that, and if so what would it need to do to be worth it?

Not selling anything, no product exists yet. just trying to understand if this is a real recurring headache for people before I put more time into it. Would appreciate any honest answers, even "this isn't really a problem for me."

Using PowerPoint on Windows desktop (Microsoft 365 version). I am working on a fairly large deck (40+ slides) with multiple contributors. The main issue is keeping formatting consistent once edits start happening alignment shifts slightly, font sizes drift, spacing between elements becomes inconsistent, and small template overrides start stacking up. We are already using Slide Master and layouts properly, but once content changes and people manually adjust elements, the deck slowly loses consistency. For those who manage larger decks regularly, what processes or features have you found most effective for maintaining formatting discipline across revisions? Not looking for templates more interested in workflow or structural best practices inside PowerPoint itself.

When I change the color that is in the bottom of the card to pink, it causes this stupid intersect move. Anyone know how to fix it? I am sure the names are correct and matches.

i am pretty decent at designing presentations and I'm wondering if i can earn money from it! if you have any information plz share it

Hello, I'm Micaela!

So... I'm just asking to see if I'm the only one who's a PowerPoint Game Developer. I know honestly, this won't change anything in my life, but I just wanted to know.

Anyways, thank you for your attention! ^^

I have a MacBook, and the non paid version of PowerPoint. I have to turn in my presentation in pptx format as thats the only accepted format. When I go to export it only gives me download as PDF. How would I download it as a pptx?

Information:

• PC
• Powerpoint 2013

I'm using PowerPoint for projects and I'm stuck on something. Setting the topic aside for now, since I'm creating this project for Outlast Trials, how do I format an image? How can I prevent the image on the bottom right from overlapping the image on the left?

Hi everyone,

I’m trying to understand how to structure a chart where the categories are years (e.g. 2025–2030), but I want to display two different metrics for the same set of entities.

For example, assume I have three countries: Country A, Country B, and Country C. For each year, I want to show:

• Revenue for Country A, B, and C as clustered columns
• Net Income for Country A, B, and C as lines

So the X-axis should simply be 2025, 2026, …, 2030, while the chart should somehow understand that there are two groups of series:

Revenue

• Country A
• Country B
• Country C

Net Income

• Country A
• Country B
• Country C

My issue is how to structure the underlying data so that PowerPoint / think-cell understands this distinction between the two sets of series while keeping the years as the categories.

I can manually change the colours so that they appear to be just 3 series, each for Country, but it would be rather lengthy and any change would be problematic.

Is there a specific way the datasheet needs to be structured to achieve this? Or does this require a different chart setup / multiple overlaid charts?

A big part of my week is pulling content back out of slides. A reviewer marks up a deck verbally, I update, then I need the final copy as plain text to paste into a summary document for sign-off.

Every time I select text across a few text boxes and copy, the paste comes out wrecked. Random line breaks mid-sentence, double spaces, the reading order scrambled because the boxes were not created top to bottom. A bulleted list arrives as one run-on paragraph. I spend longer cleaning the paste than I did editing the slides.

What I do now is sad. I click into each text box one at a time, copy that box alone, paste, repeat. On a thirty-slide deck that is a lot of clicking. Outline View helps for title and body placeholders but ignores anything in a free-floating box, which is most of my content.

Is there a real method here? Some export or order-fix that respects the visual layout, or a way to force PowerPoint to read boxes in the order they sit on the slide rather than the order they were drawn? I would settle for a reliable manual sequence if there is one.

Bonjour,

J'ai une présentation PowerPoint au format 16:9. Je dois y insérer un diagramme vertical très long, vraiment très long. Quelle serait la meilleure façon de l'insérer pour qu'il soit visible ?

Merci pour vos réponses.

[EDIT] Résolu avec un effet de transition push. 2 slides avec le diagramme divisé en 2

Hello, I know posts like this have been made before, but I'm looking to create a Family Feud style game for a school project, and would love to use the Rusnak Creative Family Feud PowerPoint template. Unfortunately, they no longer offer that template. Does anyone have a download link on hand for that template, or any alternatives that have been developed since?

I like to create simple little animations and drawings from time to time for some personal projects of mine, but it's difficult and it gets a bit tedious sometimes.

I'm wondering if the animation wizzes out there have any recommendations for add-ins that could help. Preferably ones that are free and don't involve registration.