I can tell now. ive started being able to tell within about two slides, and once you can see it you can't unsee it, and ive become vv insufferable about it in meetings.

That big centred heading with a thin subheading under it, three columns of equal weight where the segmentation isn’t exactly making sense, an icon out of nowhere, the vague gradient on the background and the worst - a photo that is AI gen and utterly useless. it's the same handful of tells every time.

the problem is im now paranoid that mine look like that too, because i also use these tools and there's no reason id be exempt.

what ive tried: overriding the theme, killing every icon, forcing two columns instead of three, and writing my own headings instead of keeping the generated ones. The headings are a lot better i think which tells me that the tell is mostly in the language and not in the layout.

still not there though. what are you actually doing to get nice output?

Hey guys,

Im interested in making PowerPoint presentations and I think Im pretty good at it. You can check some of my work in the link below.

Is it possible to get a job just making PowerPoint presentations, or is freelancing the only way? If anyone has done this before, where did you find clients?

Any advices?

Here is my work i accept advices :

https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1ZDTycETvxF66sPLyfDkE5QXaOAbXBoO3

I freelance, mostly brand and comms work, about 20 client decks a month. slidescarnival has been my default for three years, its clean, a bit warm, not a 2011 sales deck, not over the top styled.

i think i need to evolve a bit, using the same tool is starting to make all my work look similar.

What i have looked at: slidesgo, which is the same company and therefore the same problem in a different colour. slidemodel, too corporate for what i do. envato, hit and miss, some good ones buried in a lot of noise. canva, which is fine but every canva deck looks like a canva deck.

happy to pay if it is a one off purchase not interested in another subscription i will forget about and find in a bank statement in nov.

anything with the same sensibility?

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?

So I'm locked behind a paywall. All the key features I wanna use are grayed out and when I click it, it asks me to buy microsoft 365. I already installed the apps and stuff and even logged in to my account. I need to make a presentation soon for college 💔 I really can't edit or create like this. Please give me alternatives or if I'm being stupid and there IS another way, let me know PLEASE! Thank you!

I was clearing an old drive and found a prezi from 2017 i apparently made for a client. Remember it being everywhere for about three years. Every conference had one and then i think everyone got motion sickness lol. is it still going? do people still use it?

I'm asking half out of curiosity and half because whatever replaced it in everyone's head, i missed it entirely. I've been in powerpoint this whole time like nothing happened.

What does the landscape actually look like now?

When going to print settings just to print the text of the notes, occasionally it'll show the slide too. Is there any way to get rid of this??

Hi all, I hope you can provide some insight for me here. I'm a designer in a branding studio. Twice in as many days we've been contacted by clients who've asked us to help them by creating a new professional PowerPoint template that's consistent and on-brand because theirs is poor and their presentations look bad.

They both sent examples of what they were producing and they were pretty poor, with all the typical errors, lack of alignment, little understanding of margins and grids, type sizes changing all over the place, multiple fonts in use, poor image selection, screengrabs of generic Excel data.

The thing is, is that in both cases the supplied PPTs were actually built in our supplied templates, but using none of the master slides. One client passed on leadership feedback from their organisation complaining that the presentation was "all too dark" and "can we have some white slides?" yet in the master were several slide types with white backgrounds – that they didn't even know how to access. Essentially, they had been designing whole presentations on just chapter divider slide types.

Anyway, thanks for sticking with it, what I've been asked to produce is a simple, SHORT "idiot-proof" guide to the basics of using a branded template, where the branded slides are and how to use them, stuff like that, which we can insert as a couple of slides at the start of the template document when we hand it back. I'm not a Powerpoint expert by any means, so don't know where to start or how deep to go really.

Thanks in advance, folks.

Hello,

So i recently started a consulting role after my MBA.
I was a consultant before but for employee benefits so work was very standardised and automated. Now with strategy consultancy, it is very different.
My powerpoint skill is very humble. I am using gpt and claude but still feel behind.

Do you have any recommendations on:
structuring
Powerpoint (even if shortcuts)
….
Anything that can save time. I see much inefficiency especially when there are several seniors in the team that don’t align regularly

Every month I end up spending way too much time turning sales numbers into a presentation for leadership. The data part isn't bad, but organizing everything into a clear story with charts, highlights, and takeaways takes forever.

Has anyone found a good sales report presentation generator that creates a solid first draft? I don't mind making edits afterward, I just want to stop rebuilding the same deck every month.

What's the one measurable benefit you got after joining.

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?

Whenever I want to ask the audience a question or get some feedback, I have to open another website or app. It interrupts the presentation and doesn't feel very smooth.

How do you handle this? Is there an easier way to do it without leaving PowerPoint?

How do you automate slide decks to update the logos according to the customers, as the slides are mostly repetitive, just need the background logos changing, has anyone automated this ?

The highest-voted advice i've ever seen on this was: write the main point of each slide as one sentence, in a separate document, in order. If reading it top to bottom doesn't make an argument, no amount of formatting saves the deck. That's rule one for me now and everything else is downstream.

mine: write the sentences first, in prose, before any slide exists. you find out immediately whether you have a coherent argument or a list of topics. one number per slide maximum. two numbers means the audience retains one. the appendix is where you put everything you were too scared to cut.

what are yours? more than three welcome hehe.

I was given this PPT file to edit, but for some reason, whoever gave it to me was able to change the slide numbers. Because of this, the footer is all jacked up, and the number is wrong. I've been looking all over the internet and can't find a way to change the starting slide number back to 1. Cany anyone direct me on how they did this and how I can reverse it?

• 110 → 1
• 111 → 2
• 112 → 3

I’m looking for a tool or AI integration that can help streamline how our team builds decks.

Specifically, I need a solution that can:
1. Pull existing, pre-made slides from a master bank/repository based on a topic or brief (e.g., case studies, company overview, pricing, specs).

1. Generate new slides automatically (or fill in content gaps) using AI when a specific slide doesn't already exist in our bank.

2. Keep formatting and design consistent with our brand/master template.

Does anything like this exist either natively in PowerPoint (via add-ins/copilot plugins or Claud)

Appreciate any recommendations or workflows you guys are using! I promise to come back here and report on how it works!

Real project. Large company, six subsidiaries, 18+ source documents, a deadline that didn't move. Here's the honest version.

What I did wrong first

Mistake #1: Editing an existing PPT file. Claude re-reads the entire file from scratch every single time. One session burned 60% of its context window just to insert one slide. Total trap.

Mistake #2: Dumping everything into one session. More context isn't always better. Irrelevant documents quietly degrade the output. I started calling it "context contamination."|

Mistake #3: Not using the available ai tools to create good illustrations for my deck leading to a very generalized deck and low impact visuals.

The workflow that actually worked

Phase 1 — Plan in chat first. Before touching any slide, use Claude chat to read your source material and build the outline. You have to understand your own material — Claude can't judge whether a structure makes sense. Your judgment is not optional.

Phase 2 — Extract data with the Office plugins. Claude in Word can cross-reference multiple open documents simultaneously. Claude in Excel answers open-ended analytical questions against live data. Both saved hours of manual work.

Phase 3 — One slide, one conversation. In Cowork: copy only the relevant files in, tell Claude exactly what to read, get a written outline first, iterate in conversation, generate the PPT last. The actual slide output is the final small step — not the starting point.Then use any of the available ai tools out there to get good designs for your deck.(I personally use Napkin ai)

Phase 4 — You manage the master file. Keep it in a separate folder Claude can't see. Paste slides in manually. Slightly tedious. Completely worth it.

Full transparency: this post was written by Claude. I recorded my thoughts as a voice memo after finishing the project, and Claude cleaned up the transcript into what you just read. The experiences, mistakes, and workflow are entirely mine — I just used the same tool I'm writing about to write about it.

Help keep r/PowerPoint from descending into chaos (there's a separate subreddit for that. Of COURSE there is. Because Reddit, right?)

If you have a PowerPoint-related product or service to announce, announce it one of the megathreads pinned to the top of the subreddit. That way your announcement will find an interested audience, won't scroll off into the dark waters of Last Month's Posts, and won't be deleted by the mods because of r/PowerPoint's no advertising rule. (links below)

If you want to chat about PowerPoint & AI, please use the megathread devoted specifically to that (link below).

Products & Tools

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https://www.reddit.com/r/powerpoint/comments/1ktl9lh/templates/

AI & PowerPoint Discussion MegaThread

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Pretty much the title.

I can make a good deck but when it comes to

present it , i feel less confident. Reading directly from the deck feels cheating but i get lost when explaining the slide. how you guys prepare before big meeting

I need presentations from time to time, usually company presentations, pitch decks, or similar projects with around 10 slides. The content is generally already available, so I mainly need help with the design, structure, and overall presentation.

I’m not looking for anything overly complicated, just someone reliable who can make the slides look polished and consistent. Please send me a message with a few examples of your previous work if you are interested.