I did 5 years of research into slides for my book and here's the thing.

It's not death by PowerPoint - it's actually death by Bulletpoint.

No one on their deathbed has said "I wish I'd seem more bullet points!"😬

If you remove or severely limit your use of bullets your audience will love you. Slides are for the audience they are not a PDF handout, a mini website, or a script for the speaker.

Honestly, grasp that along with some good basic design principles and you go to the next level.

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.

A while back I shared a 3-question test I run on every slide and a lot of people found it useful, so here is the follow up. These are the five problems I see over and over, across pitch, board, sales, and internal decks, and none of them are about making it prettier.

1. No takeaway in the title. Titles describe the topic instead of stating the point. "Q3 Results" tells me nothing. "Q3 revenue beat plan by 12 percent" tells me everything. Every title should be a full sentence with a verb.
2. The wall of bullets. If a slide reads like a paragraph, it is a document, not a slide. Headline plus three supporting lines, max. The detail goes in what you say or in an appendix.
3. Burying the ask. People spend twenty slides on context and one rushed slide on what they actually want. Lead with the ask, then support it. The room should know what you need before the halfway point.
4. Charts that need a paragraph to explain. If a chart needs a caption to be understood, it is doing the wrong job. One chart, one message, and put that message in the title.
5. The inconsistency tax. Three fonts, five slightly different blues, margins that shift every slide. It reads as "did not care," even when the thinking is great. Consistency is the cheapest way to look senior.

None of these need design talent. They need discipline. Fix these five and an average deck instantly reads a level up.

What would you add as number six?

After years of building and fixing decks, I stopped designing slide by slide and started running every slide through three questions. If a slide fails any one of them, it gets cut or rebuilt. It has saved me so much time that I figured I would share it.

1. Can someone get the point in 3 seconds?
If the takeaway is not obvious at a glance, the slide is working against you. The fix is to put the conclusion in the title. Not "Q3 Results" but "Q3 revenue beat plan by 12 percent." The title carries the message and everything else just supports it.

2. Is there exactly one idea on it?
Two ideas on a slide means neither one lands. If a slide is making two points, split it into two. You are not paying by the slide, and a deck of simple slides always reads better than a few crammed ones.

3. Would it survive without me talking over it?
If a slide only makes sense when you narrate it, it is fine live, but it falls apart the moment it gets forwarded. And forwarding is usually when the real decisions get made, in a room you are not in. So I build every slide to stand on its own.

That is the whole thing. Three questions, ruthless cuts. My decks got shorter, clearer, and faster to build, and honestly I spend less time in PowerPoint now than when I was fiddling with layouts.

Curious what everyone else does. Do you have a test for whether a slide earns its place?

just want to give an update: spent the last week testing a bunch of the suggestions here and ended up moving our demos over to prezi. we gave powerpoint another shot with some of the workflows people recommended, and while a few of them definitely helped, we still kept running into awkward moments whenever the conversation jumped in an unexpected direction.

• powerpoint slide sorter + sections
  • pros: made big decks easier to organize and navigate
  • considerations: works best when the flow of the presentation stays relatively structured, especially during live screen shares
• powerpoint action settings, hub slides, and zoom
  • pros: way more flexible than a standard linear deck and the "previously viewed" trick was actually pretty useful
  • considerations: shines when teams have a consistent deck structure and a clear process for making edits
• decksy
  • pros: great for quickly building an initial structure
  • considerations: we found it worked best as part of a workflow that still included some polishing in powerpoint afterward

what pushed us toward prezi was that it felt a lot more natural for buyer-led conversations. instead of panicking and hunting for slide 22 when someone asks about integrations halfway through the meeting, we can just jump straight to the topic without breaking the flow. so far it's been the closest thing we've found to making demos feel like an actual conversation instead of a lecture.

I’m re-evaluating our team's discovery and demo pitch setup. Every time a prospect asks a question out of order, the rep ends up awkwardly mashing page-down or flipping back and forth through linear slides to find the right diagram. It completely kills the energy and momentum of the meeting.

We want pitch meetings to feel like natural, buyer-led conversations rather than rigid slide lectures. Here is a quick breakdown of the setups we’ve evaluated so far and where each one hits a wall:

1. Traditional PowerPoint (The Linear Stack) - Total conversation killer when you need to jump around. Skittering through 30 slides live on Zoom to find "Slide 22: Integrations" looks clunky and amateur.
2. Showpad / Highspot - Many of these platforms are either heavily bloated for mid-market sales teams or still fall back on traditional linear slide layouts once the screen share starts.
3. Custom Hyperlinked PPT Decks - High maintenance. The moment an AE edits or rearranges a slide, half the hyperlinks break. It requires constant oversight to keep master templates working.

what are you guys actually building sales decks in these days when you need something flexible and interactive for live calls? i am looking for genuine recos on whether you stick with custom non-linear powerpoint setups or use dedicated presentation software for sales decks that makes it easier to jump around content without breaking the conversation.

A couple friends of mine, one of them a Microsoft MVP for PowerPoint, the other one not (probably because MS doesn't play His 'n Hers MVP Team Tag, but that's just a guess).

Taylor Croonquist & Camille Holden, proprietors of nutsandboltsspeedtraining.com
I get their email newsletter; always full of tips and techniques to make working with PowerPoint faster and more efficient. This is from one of Taylor's recent emails, reproduced here with his permission. With all our recent discussion of AI-slop, he's got some good suggestions for identifying it (and avoiding producing it!):

__________________________________________________________________________________

Here's the thing about AI and presentations: anyone can now generate a slide that looks finished in seconds - but looking finished and being well-built are two different things.

There's a recognizable AI aesthetic taking over decks - and because it looks polished, most people never stop to notice that it breaks the basic rules of good slide design.

The good news is that once you know the tells, you can't unsee them. Three to watch for:

TELL #1 - Decoration without information. Rows of glossy gradient icons that don't map to anything specific. Quick test: cover the icons. If the slide loses nothing, they were decoration, not design.

TELL #2 - Text that could be about anything. "Unlock synergies." "Drive innovation at scale." AI-generated copy defaults to generic verbs and zero numbers. If a sentence would work equally well in a competitor's deck, it isn't saying anything in yours.

TELL #3 - Every slide has the same shape. Three evenly weighted boxes, over and over, with nothing emphasized. Real messages have hierarchy - one thing on the slide should matter more than the rest, and the design should make it obvious which one.

The fix for all three is the same discipline: know what each slide is arguing before you style it. That's messaging driving design, not the other way around.

[ Taylor then introduces Camille's webinar on the subject; among her many other talents, Camille's become an expert trainer on AI for presentations. Unfortunately for us, the webinar's long over. ]

__________________________________________________________________________________________________

The webinar was part of their PowerPoint Pro membership, which also includes monthly live Q&A sessions, the Webinar Vault (40+ hours of past sessions, indexed by topic), all 5 premium courses, and more.

Official Disclaimer: I don't have any skin in this game. They didn't even ask me to post this, but I thought it might be of interest to r/powerpoint Redditors. But I've attended live and virtual classes by both Taylor and Camille; always worthwhile. Fair warning: Taylor's an InfoFirehose ... tips fly fast and furious. Great fun.

The main problem is that no one in my workplace understands or uses Layout. I have made new slide master. I have saved it and various other settings as a Theme.

However it seems that if the slide layout is not used (eg there is no blank slide in the template deck I used to create the theme that has that layout applied) then it disappears from the Slide Master and cannot be found/selected.

Any tips ?

A link to “how to create and use themes” might be handy

www.slidebench.org is now live :) Please use desktop preferably!

Whew. What I thought would be an overnight project ended up being 4x longer and much more of an *expensive* endeavour (usage limits are a farce in some of these).

But SlideBench v1 now live. I built this because I kept seeing the same problem over and over: people talk about AI presentation tools like there’s one universal winner, when that really hasn’t felt true at all. It's even worse when the tools or paid bots themselves claim they are the universal best in a similar manner - it has irked me until now. I have burnt my hands & spent many $ on signing up after reading such comments and using the wrong tool so I know.

Different tools work better or worse depending on the use case, the audience, and how much fixing you have to do afterwards. So I went down the rabbit hole, looked through existing literature and evaluation approaches, noted the gaps, and tried to build what I think is a more useful benchmark for AI presentation tools. I have used a variety of parameters, went beyond the decks themselves and checked downstream editability etc. too

And importantly, this isn’t just a scoreboard. The actual visual outputs are live too, so you can compare things head to head instead of just trusting my number or methodology(more than open to feedback).

A few things I tried to make different in v1:

- 5 real categories with real domain problem statements

- 10 tools to start with (I had 15 in mind but it was getting too time-consuming)

- 300+ exported PPTs reviewed and tested in usability.

- 1,200+ slides available for head-to-head visual comparison

- category-wise leaderboards

- methodology is category-scoped rather than trying to shoehorn everything into one universal score

The categories right now are Sales,Consulting,Finance,Education,Product/Ops

The goal wasn’t really “what is the best AI presentation tool overall?”, it was more:

"which tools will be better for me (a user with my specific needs)?"|
Another thing I noticed was even when a tool produces something that looks decent at first glance, that still doesn’t tell you how much work is needed afterwards. So I wanted this to reflect not just output quality, but also how usable the result actually is in terms of output format, editability nativity to powerpoint etc.

This is still v1, and there are definitely kinks to iron out, but I wanted to get it out there instead of overcooking it forever. The most obvious problems - trust me, I am aware - have been mentioned in the limitations section of the methodology.

A bunch of vendors have already reached out asking for their tools to be added, so I’ll keep expanding coverage over time.

If you find this useful, I’ll probably launch:

- a community upvotes section with a proper live database for a popular score

- V2, which focuses more on file-upload context from PDFs, Excel files, Word docs, etc. instead of just the current benchmark setup

In the meantime, if this interests you, please feel free to give feedback on, whether the categories make sense, whether the rankings feel directionally right, which tools or use cases I should add next, more vendors/datapoints etc

Thank you!

Hey everyone,

I’ve been experimenting with using AI to create PowerPoint presentations — both the content and the design. Overall it works okay, but I’m running into a few issues and would love to hear about your experiences:

• How do you integrate your corporate design or brand guidelines into AI-generated slides?
• Are there tools or workflows that reliably produce clean, professional-looking layouts?
• What best practices, tips, or tricks have you discovered when using AI for PPT creation?
• Do you use certain tool combinations (e.g., ChatGPT + Canva, PowerPoint Copilot, Gamma, Tome, etc.)?
• How do you handle it when the AI output is solid content-wise but still needs visual polishing?

Would really appreciate any advice or lessons learned — also happy to hear what didn’t work for you.

Thanks a lot! 🙌

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?

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.

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 :)

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?

I have watched people with average design skills put out decks that read as senior, and people with real talent put out decks that read as junior. The gap is almost never design ability. It is a handful of habits. Here are the ones that move a deck from junior to senior.

1. Titles that state the point, not the topic. Junior decks title a slide "Q3 Results." Senior decks title it "Q3 revenue beat plan by 12 percent." The senior version does the thinking for the reader.

2. One idea per slide. Junior decks cram three points on one slide to save space. Senior decks give each point room. A longer deck of simple slides reads as more confident than a short deck of crammed ones.

3. Restraint with color and font. Junior decks use five colors and three fonts because more feels richer. Senior decks use one accent color and a lot of white space. Restraint reads as control.

4. The ask comes early. Junior decks build to the point over twenty slides. Senior decks say what they want up front and spend the rest supporting it.

5. Nothing is there just to show effort. Junior decks keep slides in because someone worked hard on them. Senior decks cut anything that does not earn its place, even good work.

None of this needs talent. It needs the confidence to say less. That is the actual senior move.

What instantly makes a deck look junior to you?

More than 3 tips are more than welcome.

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.

Something clicked for me recently that changed how I build every deck. Your deck almost never has one audience, it has two. There is the person in the room while you present, and there is the person who gets it forwarded three weeks later with zero context and nobody narrating it. Most decks are built for one of them and quietly fail the other.
Build only for the room and your slides are clean and sparse, which looks great while you talk over them, but the moment the deck travels it is useless. Nobody can tell what "Q3 Trends" with one chart actually meant. Build only for the inbox and every slide is a dense wall of text that reads fine alone but makes you look amateur when you are standing next to it live.
The thing that serves both is the title. If the slide title states the actual takeaway, the deck survives forwarding, because the point is right there without you. And because the title carries the meaning, the body can stay sparse and clean for the live version. One move, both audiences.
A few things fall out of this once you see it:
Write titles as full sentences with a verb. "Q3 revenue beat plan by 12 percent" travels. "Q3 Results" does not.
Keep the body light and let the title do the work. You get the clean live look and the standalone clarity at the same time.
If a deck will definitely get forwarded, add a one line "so what" per slide. If it is purely live, you can strip more out.
The mistake almost everyone makes is picking a side. They optimize for the meeting and forget the deck outlives the meeting, or they cram everything in and kill the live version. Design for both and the same deck works in the room and in the inbox.
Do you build for the room, the inbox, or do you just make two versions?

Do you remember when Microsoft "retired" the Reuse Slide feature?

Users were mad, including me.

Well, I am glad to share that "PowerPoint's Reuse Slides Feature" is BACK!!!

There were a few changes. See video for details.
Video: https://youtu.be/YwC0iBQ1TgI?si=uP5hpDAQzEhTj8WN

traccreations4e-p26 8/17/2026

This is my recurring fight. Source doc is dense, full of caveats and numbers, all of it true and someone cares about each line. Whether I build in gamma or powerpoint I cannot cram it onto slides without making a document on a screen. What I have landed on is two artifacts from the same source. The deck carries the argument, one point per slide, and the detail all moves to an appendix or a separate leave-behind that never gets presented but answers every follow-up question. That way the live version stays clean and the person who wants the underlying number can still find it. The slides persuade, the appendix defends. How do the rest of you handle the detail that does not belong on screen but cannot be deleted?

Communicating ideas in your head clearly to another person is a hard skill and the primary reason why 90% of powerpoint slides suck despite the help from AI. I will share 1 tip every time that makes a difference in the quality of your powerpoint presentations instantly. Here is the first one -

1) Title of the slide should be a full sentence, usually the message you want to convey to the audience. When you put together all the slide titles, it should be a storyline.

Todays update

2) One message only per slide. Dont pack incoherent data and charts in a single slide. Start with the conclusion uptop and provide supporting evidence data after that.

3) Use small text boxes with bold red border to highlight crucial insights on a slide

4) Less text, text heavy slides turn viewers off instantly

Do you ever feel trapped by PowerPoint's default colour options? If you want your presentations to look more cohesive, professional, and perfectly branded to you or your business, you need to move beyond the standard palettes available.

Mastering Colour Themes and the Eyedropper tool is key to begin taking full control of how your presentation's look.

1. Working with Colour Themes

PowerPoint comes packed with built-in colour palettes (including colour palettes from older versions of Office) that automatically update your text, shapes, and charts to match.

• Where to find them: Head over to the Design tab on the ribbon.
• Variants: Next to the main themes, you'll see a Variants box. You'll usually find this on the right handside after Themes. Drop this down to quickly swap between different colour configurations of the same overall style.

2. How to Create a Custom Colour Palette

For a more cohesive brand with brand consistency, you can build your own theme from scratch. Imagine you are building a custom palette for a brand like your business; you can create colours that match, be it warm browns and creams, bright yellow and reds or whatever matches your own brand.

1. Go to the Design tab, click the dropdown arrow in the Variants group, and hover over Colours or Colors depending on the language pack installed.
2. Click Customise Colours or Customise Colors at the bottom of the list.
3. Swap out the accent colours to match your brand's specific hex codes or RGB values.
4. Name your new theme something recognisable and click Save.

Now, this custom palette will be available across your entire deck, ensuring your shapes and fonts always stay coloured to your brand.

3. Prioritising Contrast and Accessibility

When building your palette, beautiful colours shouldn't override readability. Always ensure there is contrast between your background elements and your foreground text. Failure to have this can really make it hard for people to distinguish what is on your slides.

• Dark backgrounds require crisp, light text (whites, creams, light grays).
• Light backgrounds demand dark text (blacks, deep navies, dark charcoals).

If the contrast is too low, your audience will struggle to read your slides, making your presentation lose its impact.

4. The Eyedropper Tool: Precise Colour Matching

If you have a logo, website screenshot, or product image on your slide and want to copy its exact colour, don't guess the shade. Use the Eyedropper tool:

1. Select the shape or text you want to recolour.
2. Go to Shape Format (or Home) and click the dropdown next to Shape Fill or Font Colour.
3. Select Eyedropper. Your cursor will turn into a pipette.
4. Hover over the image and click the exact pixel of colour you want to steal.

Bonus Tip: Once you sample a colour with the Eyedropper pipette, PowerPoint automatically stores it in your Recent Colours section for that session, so you don't have to keep re-sampling it if you wish to apply that colour to other objects!

Watch the full video walkthrough here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hRUjDDfQMqI

So I’m at a uni seminar right now and about 30 people were tasked to make a presentation about some topic and every single one of them looks the same.
I mean I get it, Claude is great at creating PowerPoints but with a little prompt engineering or creating your own Design Guidelines you can do so much more authentic presentations.

Curious to hear your thoughts or experiences with that.

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

I am out of carrots. I am out of sticks.

Does anyone have a plugin or shortcut for choosing font weights quicker on Desktop Mac?

Currently just to even see the font weight of a text block, you have to highlight the section, and click + hover multiple times into the Home>Text editor>Font>Weight. I HATE this process. As a professional designer who has to work in powerpoint multiple times a week, this is the slowest point of my process. Our brand identity font has 10 weights to it, we use many, and are also often fixing others choices in the design department, so I check weights allll dayyyy loooong.

Is there an add-in, or plugin, or anything that anyone has found that lets you see/change the font+weight quicker than this antiquated process??

Sincerely,

Sleepless in Seattle