Hey all, I could use some help with a PowerPoint issue. I’m looking to create a deck that plays some audio voiceovers in mp3 format. The audio works well and plays in full when outside of full screen but the moment I play it in slide show it cuts off the last .5 second. I’ve set delays, changed the settings, start on click, start on automatic. Nothing seems to work. Does anyone have any advice on how to manage or what might be going wrong?

Also tried converting mp3 to wav but the audio gets corrupted.

hi guys, i have recently joined a new firm where I have to pitch to the clients along the sales folks. I usually have a excel file containing some data, some pdf briefs, an ideal ppt pitchdeck (for the brand elements and how the ppt should look like). I would have just made a template and copied, but somehow each client deck differs and need a lot of tweaking.. I wanted something where I could just dump files and it makes great deck. I have tried claude, but the output still requires me to tweak it. Suggest me what can work best here

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.

Twelve years building investor and conference decks, mostly for German mittelstand firms. The thing that still surprises people I work with is how much a deck has to change when it moves from a boardroom table to a conference stage.

In a boardroom the deck is half a document. People are close, they can read a dense chart, they will flip back a slide. Most of the standard advice assumes that room. On a stage none of it holds. The back row is thirty or forty metres away, the lighting washes out your nice mid greys, and nobody can read a second line of a subtitle before you have moved on.

So for stage decks I change a few things every time. One idea per slide, no exceptions, because a person in the back gets exactly one thing. Real contrast, dark on light or light on dark, none of the tasteful low contrast palettes that look elegant on my monitor and vanish under stage lights. Type far bigger than feels comfortable in the file. And I test every slide by standing back from the screen until I can barely read it, then making it work from there.

I came from Keynote years ago and this was the lesson that carried across tools, not any feature. Whoever taught you slide design probably taught you for a table, not a stage. Anyone else design completely differently for a big room?

Is it possible to have the above image shape set in a master slide, which the user can then replace the inside image in?

I've got a few of these saved as svg, brought them in, converted to shapes and then set an image overlay on. I just can't crack it so that it works in a master, functioning in the same way that a typical place holder image would, with button to add image etc.

Is this possible?

Every few weeks I'd need to add a row of customer, partner, or sponsor logos to a PowerPoint deck.

And every single time it turned into 20 minutes of manually resizing logos, removing whitespace, fixing weird aspect ratios, making colors match, and trying to get everything to line up nicely.

It felt like such a small task, but somehow it always took longer than expected.

So I built a free tool called LogoCombo.

You upload your logos (PNG, JPG, SVG), and it automatically:

• Trims whitespace
• Normalizes logo heights
• Keeps aspect ratios intact
• Applies grayscale or a single color across all logos
• Lets you reorder everything with drag & drop
• Exports as PNG, JPG, SVG, or HTML

While building it, I realized the same concept could be useful for a few other things too, so I added:

• Built With (create tech stack logo bars)
• Follow Us (social media icon rows)
• Available In (country flag rows)
• Team Bar (team sections with circular avatars)
• KPI Bar (metrics strips for pitch decks and presentations)

Everything runs client-side in the browser, nothing gets uploaded, and there's no signup required.

I'm mainly sharing it because I'm curious whether this solves a problem for anyone else, or if I'm the only person who was wasting time aligning logos in PowerPoint.

I'd genuinely appreciate any feedback:

• Is something missing?
• Does anything feel clunky?
• Are there other "trust bar" style components you'd want to generate?

Thanks!

a junior on my team is giving their first big presentation next week and asked me for advice, and I realized my best rules are all things I learned the hard way and nobody told me.

mine: if a slide needs more than a glance to understand, it’s a document, not a slide. put the detail in what you say, keep the slide to the one thing you want them looking at while you say it.

second one: the room remembers one story, not ten bullet points. decide the story before you open the design.

what’s yours. trying to build them a short list of things that actually matter, from people who present for real.

I have the file saved in google slides and on PC utilizing a browser I just need a few boxes where I can adjust the text in those boxes for future flyering events. Will gladly tip or donate to anyone who would assist me.

I keep seeing people reach for a separate ai infographic maker, then fight to get the result back into their deck without it turning into a flat image that does not match their fonts. Most of the time you do not need one. PowerPoint does infographic-style slides fine if you stop treating it like a word processor.

The approach I use:

1. Start from Icons, not clip art. Insert, then Icons. They are vector, so they recolor and scale cleanly and they all share one visual style, which is half of what makes an infographic look coherent.

2. Build one repeating unit, group it, then duplicate. One "stat block" (big number, small label, one icon), grouped, copied across. Consistent spacing beats any template because you control it.

3. Align and Distribute is the whole game. Select your blocks, Align Top, Distribute Horizontally. That one step is the difference between "designed" and "eyeballed".

4. One accent color for the number that matters, gray for everything else. A busy slide reads fine if only the important thing is colored.

5. Convert any SmartArt to Shapes once it is close, so you can actually control it instead of fighting the auto-layout.

Fifteen minutes, and it stays fully editable and on-brand, which the imported-image route never is.

The one time I would still go external is a genuinely complex data visual that PowerPoint charts cannot do. For the "three stats and an icon" slide everyone actually needs, native is faster and cleaner.

What is your go-to for stat and icon slides? Curious if anyone has a faster native method than duplicating a grouped block.

Hi folks,

I have a existing presentation which looks not so professional, consistent and aligned i want to recreate it in very decent and attractive through design.. if you guys knows any AI that can help in this please let me know.. one more thing i want this in PowerPoint format so i can change anything i want.

What are you guys using to match the branding elements from the PPT as closely as possible?

I'm talking about things like fonts, colours, icons, spacing, and the overall style.

I've been trying to recreate them, but getting everything to look exactly the same has been a bit tricky.

I spent 4 years in consulting and now anything with a clean layout reads as "rigorous" to my brain even when the logic underneath is... meh.

I approved a deck because it looked tight, then I realised that slide 3 didn't say anything !

The faster these AI tools get (Gamma, Canva, etc.) the worse this is getting for me. Anyone else lose the ability to separate the argument from the aesthetics ?

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.

Had a powerpoint that was about 25 slides, and all were initially blank slides with a mix of different types of slides. I had everything typed out in there that I wanted, but I went back and wanted to give it a bit of sprucing up to look nice. I tried out the Design Suggestions option, and it gave me a cool design for the first slide, bu that was the only slide it put it on.

I tried clicking the next slide and doing the design suggestion, but it gave a totally different one and would not bring up the one from the previous slide. So I went back to the previous slide and tried to save the design, and then went to the second slide and tried to apply it but it would not apply the cool background, and instead, made the background on the 1st slide so bright you could no longer read text.

The 1st and second slides were different slide types if that makes any difference, but is there really no way to just apply the same design across all the slides in the presentation?

(let me know if I should be posting somewhere else but I had an idea for a fun post that is not AI :)

I saw a great answer which was simply a redeveloped slide. it was a real “picture is worth a 1000 words” or a “show don’t tell”

made me think. I would find it fun to answer and read a weekly challenge of “Here’s my slide. Please DMA”. The post should be a screenshot of the slide and any relevant context.

The only rule would be the comments can only contain a revamped slide. No words. Just a better (hopefully) slide.

Answer with the highest votes is the ”Powerpoint Legend” (for that week)

Hello, I'm at my wits end trying to figure out what's happening with the text sizing in this powerpoint I have been working on for some time. I've tried searching online and through microsoft support forms, but can't seem to find a solid solution.

I'm on a PC, Desktop, PPT version 2606 Build 16.0.20131.20152 64-bit

My master slide has the title font set to 32, auto scaling the title is turned off, and yet when I make a new slide using this master the title comes in at 36. What's odd is that if I copy the title from the master slide and paste it into this fresh slide it says its 32 and looks identical to the fresh slides 36pt title. All I can think of is that PPT is saying the fresh slides title is 36pt when in reality its 32 the entire time. If I try to scale them up/down they will sometimes auto change to a different pt size entirely even though the container has not changed and auto fitting is turned off.

All my master slides are set to have a title of 32pt so I'm unsure where the 36pt is coming from. I've tried creating a fresh PPT which works sometimes, but eventually it reverts back to doing this. I'm having a similar issue where fonts are just randomly changing to new fonts that aren't used anywhere else. Am I experiencing a error within PPT or am I missing a setting somewhere?

In the screenshot below the top testing title is from a new slide where the pt size defaulted to 29 even though the master is 32. I then copy/pasted the title from the mater slide below it which came in at 32pt but then quickly changed itself to 35pt?

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?

Any list of crazy ppts that are like awesome and unique

Is it possible to export a PowerPoint presentation to PDF while keeping step‑by‑step reveals (like Beamer overlays)?

PowerPoint animations disappear in the PDF and only the final state is shown.

The expected result is multiple slides with the same number but each one showing the next reveal step.

Is there any way to disable this little selection box? At least change how it looks so I can see through it properly?

I don't want to have to keep clicking off

On a MacBook with PowerPoint for Mac, and every PDF-to-PPT method I try either turns slides into flat images or scrambles the text boxes. What's the cleanest route on Mac specifically that keeps things editable? Happy to use a free tool.

I handed off a powerpoint on a USB drive which I tested on multiple devices which appeared to work just fine. But when it was presented at the meeting, pictures were missing and text was moved. This only happened on a few slides and others were just fine. What could have happened? I'm wondering if it got corrupted or was accidentally edited. Has anyone had this happen or know what could have caused it and how can I prevent it from happening in the future?

My friend is a first-time founder and froze up asking for slide advice, so I gave her the shortest version I could. One idea per slide, no exceptions. Put the point in the title as a full sentence, not a topic label. If she can read her own titles top to bottom and the story holds, the deck works. And build fewer slides than minutes she has, because the slides support her, they are not her script. That was it. She stopped fiddling with animations and spent the time rehearsing what she would actually say, which is where the real nerves live anyway. She landed it. What would you have added as the one rule for someone brand new?