r/powerpoint

I have burned through 7 hours of my day today trying to accomplish a single thing: Making a single, non-rectangular image page curl off the slide as though it was a sticker being torn off folding over top of itself. I have tried so many things and none of them create the actual animation I want.

I have a workaround which sucks, involving creating a video of a second Powerpoint slide with a zoomed in matching background and the page curl transition. It is not a good solution, visually or workflow wise.

Does anyone have a way that I can accomplish this that doesn't involve learning 3D modeling? (I downloaded Blender to give you an idea of how deep in the weeds I got)

I need help automating the layout process for large PowerPoint presentations. I already have a way to extract the text I need.

The problem is the manual labor of copying that text and arranging it slide-by-slide into a specific PPT theme I've been using for 2 years. The presentations are usually quite large (80 to 100 slides).

What is the best free way to automate taking a list/file of text and pouring it directly into a PowerPoint template so that it formats automatically?

I currently have two templates (Light mode and Dark mode), each with a different colour palette for accessibility reasons.

I'd love to consolidate them into a single file. I've come across the idea of using Theme Colours and Variations to keep the palettes separate within the same template.

Has anyone done this before or know of any good guides or videos that walk through the process?

Hi everyone,

I’m building a browser-based PPTX viewer and I’m looking for honest feedback from
people who work with real PowerPoint files.

Demo:
https://ningyum.github.io/viewer-examples/

The key point: It runs entirely in the browser. It does not require PowerPoint, Office,
LibreOffice, a server-side conversion service, or uploading the deck to a backend. It
can also export the deck to a high-fidelity PDF.

The goal is not to replace PowerPoint editing. It’s to make “open this .pptx in a web
app” look much closer to PowerPoint than typical PPTX-to-HTML viewers.

Current focus:

- Pure browser-side preview
- High-fidelity PDF export
- Text, shapes, images, tables, and common layouts
- Theme / master / layout inheritance
- Charts: bar, column, line, area, pie, doughnut, scatter, radar, bubble, etc.
- Math / equation rendering
- EMF / WMF vector image support
- SmartArt fallback rendering
- Speaker notes / presenter mode
- Hyperlinks, slide actions, media preview, and basic transitions / animations

It is not a full Office clone. Known hard areas are still full SmartArt layout fidelity,
3D charts/effects, long-tail OOXML features, and complex PowerPoint animation behavior.

By the way, it is very lightweight. The preview-only bundle is under 2 MB, and the PDF export module is also under 2 MB and loaded lazily.

I’d really appreciate feedback on:

1. Does the demo look close enough to PowerPoint for normal viewing?
2. What kinds of slides break first?
3. Are charts, fonts, equations, SmartArt, or old templates visibly wrong?
4. If you use PowerPoint professionally, what would make this unusable for you?

I’m the developer of this viewer. Any feedback is welcome.

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

Anyone else struggling to use copilot to make decent slides?

I can’t seem for the life of me to be able to create any decent decks when using it. My firm has just rolled out access to us and everyone is struggling to use it.

Does anyone have any tips on how to actually use it better?

Hello,

I got a PowerPoint deck (can't share it) from someone. A few slides have multiple animations when watching in presentation. When I go to edit mode to look at the specific animated slide, I only see its first animation part. Where are the other animations to show the final results inside this slide?

I wanted to print the final results in the animated slide and not the first part in this slide. This is in updated Mac Office v16.110.2 (Build 26062818)'s PowerPoint in updated macOS Sequoia v15.7.7.

Thank you for reading and hopefully answering soon. :)

Hi everyone, I'm trying to add closed captions to a video in powerpoint on mac. When I click on the video and select generate captions, I keep getting an error message that says "something went wrong when generating captions. please try again". Does anyone know how to fix this?? D:

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 used to build slides in full color from the first second, and every deck ended up looking like a cluttered yard-sale flyer. Six colors, three of them "brand" colors I'd half-remembered, and a chart with a rainbow nobody asked for. It always felt busy and I could never figure out why.

A while back I started doing the whole deck in grayscale first. No color allowed until the structure is finished. Just black, white, and a couple of grays. It sounds boring and it changed how my slides look more than any template ever did.

Here's what it forces. When you can't use color to separate things, you have to use size, spacing, and position instead. The important number has to be big because you can't make it red. The two sections have to be physically apart because you can't tint one blue. By the time the deck reads clearly in gray, the bones are actually good.

Then at the very end I add color back, but only one. One accent for the thing that matters most on each slide. That's it. The chart that used to have seven colors now has one highlighted bar and six gray ones, and people's eyes go exactly where I want.

The side effect I didn't expect: it's faster. I stopped wasting twenty minutes per deck fiddling with color palettes, because color stopped being a decision I made on every slide. It became one decision at the end.

It's not real presentation design training or anything, just a constraint that stops me from cluttering things up. But it's the only thing that consistently gets me a clean deck.

Does anyone else use a deliberate constraint like this, or is starting in color just me?

I have an existing flow diagram using PowerPoint shapes and text. I want to improve and make it more unique. What tool do you recommend to beautify or improve it?

This sounds odd, but hear me out. I've noticed that sometimes, when a slide is visually perfect, people spend more time admiring the design than listening to the presenter. On a few projects, I've deliberately kept certain slides simpler than I probably could have. Has anyone else done this intentionally? I'm not talking about poor design just resisting the urge to polish every visual element if it doesn't help the message. Did you notice any difference in audience engagement, or am I overthinking it?

I'm trying to make a button type of thing that could take it to a different section of the PowerPoint and back.

I'm also kind of new to using powerpoint so i will need detailed instructions.

Presentation designer here, mostly corporate decks. The recurring nightmare is not the design, it is that the content lands in pieces, and the last third always shows up the evening before the meeting in a wall of bullet points someone clearly typed in a panic.
My current method is to build a small kit before any real content arrives. Two or three layout slides duplicated and locked down, a defined type scale so a "heading" is always the same size, and a single content placeholder I trust. When the late stuff comes in I am pouring text into a structure that already exists instead of designing under pressure at 11pm.
It mostly works. Where it still breaks is the dense data slide. Someone hands me a paragraph plus a table plus three "key takeaways" and wants it all on one slide, and no kit saves you from that. I usually end up splitting it across two and hoping nobody counts slides.
For those of you who do this under deadline a lot, what is your actual system for the last-minute dump? Do you have a hard rule for when a slide becomes two? And how do you push back on the everything-on-one-slide request without it turning into a fight?

he had a slide for every sentence. an actual slide that said "Agenda" followed by another slide that was the agenda. a slide that was just the word "Challenges." then four slides of challenges. then a slide that said "Solutions."

the information would have fit on maybe eight slides. possibly fewer. by minute six people were on their phones and he kept going "and as you can see here" to a slide that had four words on it.

i don't even think it's a design problem at that point, it's a "what am i actually trying to say" problem that no amount of formatting fixes. anyway. do you cut the deck down before a meeting or do people just accept the 60-slide marathon as normal now

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.

Hello, I am a university student and I am doing some work to support the university. One of my responsibilities is creating study materials for the school year. I'm given books and a pacing guide or lesson plan, depending on the case, and I have to put all of that into a presentation with a minimum of 250 slides. I was wondering if any of you knew of a way to automate this process with AI, because each presentation usually takes about a week to create, depending on its complexity.

It should be noted that the format must be PDF or pptx in order to be shared and validated at my university.

Thanks for you time!!

Presentation designer here, about eight years in, mostly corporate decks.

The recurring fight is not layout or fonts. It is hierarchy. A client hands me forty slides and every single one is, in their words, the key slide. The deck has no quiet moments because the client cannot bear to let any slide just be support for another.

When everything is emphasized, nothing is. Bold headline, full-bleed color, a stat blown up huge, on slide after slide, and by slide ten the audience has gone numb. I know this. The client knows it in theory. But in the room, each slide belongs to a different stakeholder who fought to get their thing in, and asking to dial one down means telling someone their thing matters less.

What I have started doing is building two versions, the flat one they asked for and a paced one where maybe a third of the slides carry weight and the rest breathe. I show both back to back. Usually the paced one wins because they feel the difference even if they cannot name it.

But it doubles my build time and it does not always land. For those who design decks for committees, how do you sell restraint to a room where every person owns a slide?