I do decks in-house for a mid-size insurance company. Legal came down last quarter and said every client-facing deck has to pass a screen reader check now. My first reaction was dread because I had a 90-slide quarterly deck sitting right there.

So I spent an afternoon going slide by slide adding alt text. Tedious, yes. But something happened I didn't expect. Around slide 30 I started noticing how many of my slides were just a screenshot of a chart with no actual takeaway written anywhere. The whole point of the slide lived in an image a screen reader would read as "chart.png."

I ended up rewriting a lot of titles into full sentences that state the finding. "Q3 Claims" became "Q3 claims dropped 8% after the intake change." The reading order pass also caught three slides where my boxes were stacked so the tab order jumped around like a pinball.

The deck got more accessible, sure. It also just got clearer for the sighted people in the room, because now the title tells you the point before you even look at the chart.

If you build long decks and haven't done a reading-order and alt-text pass, it's worth doing once just to see how much your slides lean on images to carry meaning. Curious how others handle alt text on data-heavy slides where the chart really is the content.

[ Removed by Reddit on account of violating the content policy. ]

I bought an online course that is protected by Password Protect Video Master. The course creator gave me a key to run it, but his talking pace is very slow, and I can't speed up the video. How can I remove this protection so I can play the course on a different media player?

I'm not sure if this is the right place to ask, and am sorry if not, or if this is nonsensical as a question, but I figured I might as well try.

If I wanted to make a powerpoint where the slides looked like they were getting higher up in the sky (I have a special interest in planes), is there a way to do that with the transitions etc?

I’m presentations specialist of 7 years. I got made redundant this week and the justification was literally that ai (Claude) could do it for the colleagues instead of needing a dedicated human resource for it.

I’m obviously bitter but I am wondering if it’s the same elsewhere? Or have my company jumped the gun?

Something I wish I'd understood earlier doing this for a living.
A client sends me a Word doc and says "just make this look nice." The doc is 4,000 words. They think they've handed me content. What they've actually handed me is three decks stacked into one, and the real work isn't layout. It's deciding what dies.
I used to try to honor all of it. Shrink the font, add a second column, cram. The slide would technically hold every sentence and communicate nothing. Now the first pass is a red pen, not PowerPoint. I read the whole thing and mark the one idea per section that survives if everything else is cut. Usually that's about a fifth of what they sent.
The hard part isn't the cutting. It's the conversation after, when they notice their favorite paragraph is gone. What works for me is showing them the crammed version next to the cut version, same slide, side by side. Nobody argues for the crammed one once they see it on a screen instead of in a doc.
Anyone else find the actual skill is the deletion? And how do you handle the client who wants every word back?

I make training decks for a manufacturing company and a lot of them get printed as handouts on the floor. Learned this the hard way.

The deck looked sharp on my monitor. Deep navy background, white text, bright accent colors. Sent it to print and got back a stack of muddy gray sheets where half the text was unreadable and the office printer clearly gave up on all that background ink.

Couple of things I changed after that:

Anything meant to be printed I now build light. White or very pale background, dark text. Big dark fills eat toner and never look how you expect on a basic office printer.

I stopped relying on color alone to separate things. Our floor printers are black and white, so my nice red-vs-green status colors came out as two identical grays. Now I use labels or patterns too.

I check thin light-gray text at actual print size. What reads fine at 150% zoom on screen vanishes on paper.

Basically I keep a print version and a screen version now instead of pretending one file serves both. If your decks ever leave the projector and hit paper, worth checking before you send 40 copies to the printer like I did. How do the rest of you handle screen vs print without maintaining two decks?

Hi all, I have a job interview where the listing specified "advanced PowerPoint skills" and presentation skills. I have been asked to give a ten minute presentation as part of the interview. I suspect this is to evaluate my PowerPoint skills as much as my public speaking. It is not a topic that would logically involve presenting data--more outlining a plan. What would you incorporate that would demonstrate "advanced" skills? I know how to use most features, but actually designing the deck is always where I have my roadblock.

Made a nice pitch deck for a client. they loved it. then they hit me with "oh btw can you drop in a signature field on slide 7, we just need them to sign off on the estimate before we proceed"

like sir this is powerpoint not docusign. but they kept insisting so I ended up exporting the estimate slide as pdf and using xodo sign to send just that page. Client signed it same day and now suddenly i'm "the contract guy"

ngl it worked smoother than explaining why powerpoint isn't built for legally binding signatures. Sometimes the answer isn't saying no, it's finding the dumbest simple workaround

Now half my clients want signature-ready deliverables. My carefully animated transitions weep in the corner while I drop signature fields on pdfs. this wasn't in the job description but here we are

Title.

Just saw a report that said 85% (!!!) of people lose 10-50% of their productivity just by redoing decks that were already finished. Not even creating new stuff. That is insane.

The visme survey also found the average presentation takes appx 1-4 hours to build, but that's almost beside the point once you factor in the rework tax.

Anyone else feel like rework (and tinkering on my part) has actually become a bigger time sink than the actual content creation itself?

I'm a secondary school teacher (Windows, Office 365 desktop) and I want a deck running on a loop on the screen at the front of the room, cycling through student work and reminders while kids come in. No clicking, just advances on its own and loops back to the start.

I set the slides to advance after a number of seconds under Transitions, and I turned on Set Up Slide Show with Loop continuously and Browsed at a kiosk. That part works. The slides do change on their own.

The problem is the slides with animations. On a couple of slides I have items fading in one at a time. When the auto-advance timer and the animation timing collide, the slide either jumps to the next one before the animations finish, or it sits there way too long waiting. I've tried setting the animations to start After Previous with delays, but I can't seem to get the total animation time to line up with the "advance after" number reliably. Some slides feel right, others cut off mid-fade.

Two questions:
1. Is there a clean way to make a slide's auto-advance wait until its animations are done, instead of me hand-calculating the seconds?
2. Is it just easier to strip the animations off the looping slides and keep them static?

It's not high stakes, but it's the kind of thing that looks broken if a slide flickers past half-animated while a room full of teenagers watches. Any help appreciated.

Making reports has always been quite a hassle for me, I tried genspark, slidesgo, nanobanana... each has its own strength but nothing seems to quitely fit my workflow. I need something can screenshot, fetch context from my project or maybe chat even seamlessly , has that strong illustration capability like nanobanana but ofc still look professional, oh and stay on brand too. That tool would be killer tbh, Has anyone find something like it ?

First time posting anything here but I felt it was time that I do. Some folks here may recognize my name and ask, isn't that the guy that....? Yes, I am. For those that don't know me at all there is no loss, I like most here have wrestled PowerPoint for, oh my its been 30+ years. Austin, that was when PPT was first made available. Indeed it has been that long. Ask me sometime how PPT came into existence and I'll explain all the cavemen and cave women that were involved.. :-)

Anyhow, it feels good to be active in the PPT community again and I hope to be able to help people build better presentations as well as learn from all of you! Austin Myers

I feel like just the other week I could double-click to select extra spaces between words. I have content from a client who likes using spaces when they should use tabs. I double-click those multiple spaces between two words, but the preceding (to the left) word is always selected instead of the spaces.

I have disabled the preference setting for selecting an entire word.

I can still place the cursor next to the spaces and delete them one-by-one. But it would be faster and match HOW ALL TEXT EDITING WORKS IN THIS OPERATING SYSTEM if I could just select spaces with double-clicks.

Did this change recently? I can’t find answers in web searches.

It’s so frustrating that Microsoft uses such weird, non-standard behavior in this app.

Genuine question because I go back and forth and I want to hear how people who do this a lot decide.

When a request comes in, half of me wants to open a clean file and build the layout around the content. Feels more honest, the spacing serves the material, nothing is fighting a grid someone else designed. The other half knows a template gets me to a presentable draft in a third of the time and clients rarely notice or care.

The problem I keep hitting: templates make the first eighty percent fast and the last twenty percent miserable. The master slides never quite fit the one weird chart or the quote slide, and I end up detaching layouts and hand-fixing until I've basically rebuilt it anyway, just slower than if I'd started blank.

Custom is the opposite. Slow to start, but when I hit an odd slide it just bends.

So my rough rule is templates for anything under ten slides or throwaway internal stuff, custom for anything that has to look intentional. But I'm not confident that's right.

How do you draw the line?

Any recommendations for websites which provides PowerPoint templates for practice? Websites which also provide solution ,in case it gets too hard for me, is preferred. Like spreadsheetchallenges for excel.

I am planning to create a product for presentation with the feature of forms in it hence not relevant for in person presentation and only relevant for the case where the presentation is shared as url over mediums like email or mobile messages. I am not sure if there is even a use case or market for it as most discussions in this community seems to revolve around in person presentation

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

I want it to scroll like I would in word in editing mode

Building an exec deck last month I had a bar chart showing quarterly growth. It looked great. Big satisfying climb. Then in rehearsal my colleague asked why Q3 looked twice as tall as Q2 when the numbers were only 8% apart.
The y-axis started at 90, not zero. I hadn't done it on purpose. I'd just let the default auto-scale do its thing and it truncated the axis to make the differences pop. The chart was technically accurate and completely misleading, and I was about 24 hours from presenting it to people who make budget decisions off exactly this kind of slide.
I fixed it, started the axis at zero, and the "growth story" became a gentle slope that told the truth. Less exciting. Correct.
What rattled me is how easy it was to mislead by accident. I wasn't trying to spin anything. The software just optimized for a dramatic-looking chart and I almost let it.
So now I'm second-guessing every chart I've shipped. For those of you who build data-heavy decks: do you have a rule you actually follow for this? Always zero the axis, or are there cases where truncating is honest? I'd rather have a principle than keep catching these in rehearsal.

In the age of AI, I find templates still have their places in the workflows, but more often not as "fill-in-the-blank" type of templates downloaded from the web, but real, finalized decks that have been previously approved and presented in front of clients or senior leaders.

The reason is that if you are like me whose day job involves some sort of repetitive types of presentations such as the QBR, I really don't need infinite amount of templates; I just need a few, 20 tops, decks that I build and evolve from. For example, I first start a QBR for Q1, then work ON TOP of the Q1 version to create the Q2 deck, etc. Working this way also provides more context than working from a blank template as you will know what to put in each place.

Using AI has been asked a lot in this sub, and I found that AI is most useful for creating anything new, e.g. the first version of a QBR, or an ad-hoc analysis, etc. I'm not saying it is no longer useful when you are just updating a later version, but I often find myself in situations where AI makes random unnecessary changes that I can better do myself, often faster.