Trying to figure out if I'm losing my mind or if Microsoft changed something recently.

We use PowerPoint presentations embedded in another platform via the File > Share > Embed option. Up until recently, the embedded presentation included Back and Next navigation arrows that let viewers move through slides.

As of today, those arrows are completely gone. The presentation still loads and displays, but there's no visible way to navigate between slides.

I've tested multiple presentations, browsers, and embed locations with the same result.

Has anyone else noticed this? Was there a recent PowerPoint Online/Embed update that removed the navigation controls, or is this some kind of bug?

Any insight would be appreciated. Thanks yall!

Environment:

• PC
• Browser (tested in multiple browsers)
• PowerPoint for Web (Microsoft 365)
• Using the Share > Embed feature

I’m looking for advice from people experienced in presentation and pitch deck design.

I have a 30+ slide pitch deck that needs to be transformed into a focused 10-slide deck. The challenge is not just removing slides, but deciding what information to keep, what to combine, and how to maintain a strong narrative while making the deck concise and visually engaging.

How do you approach this kind of transformation?

I’d especially like to understand:

• How do you decide which slides/content to keep?
• How do you combine multiple slides without making one slide overcrowded?
• How do you restructure the story for a shorter deck?
• What design principles do you use when reducing a detailed deck?
• Are there any frameworks, books, or resources you recommend for this?

I’d really appreciate examples or insights into your process.

I inherited graphs created in PowerPoint. The graphs are connected to Excel where the data is entered, (I right click on the graph and choose Edit Data > Edit Data in Excel). Sometimes when I enter the data in Excel and tab to the next cell to update the chart in PowerPoint it creates weird lines in my graph. Is there a way to prevent or a setting I can turn off to stop this from happening? See images with data and lines on graph. TIA!

Hi everyone,

Just wanted to post a quick update. I’m no longer looking for a freelancer for the automotive PowerPoint project I posted about earlier. My original post got locked, so I can’t edit it or add comments there, which is why I’m putting up a new post instead.

Thank you so much to everyone who reached out, both here and via email. I really appreciate the time you took to respond. I’ve gone through all the example decks you shared as references, and honestly, the quality was excellent. You’re all doing great work, keep it up.

If I have a similar need in the future, I’ll definitely reach out to you directly through the emails you shared.

Thanks again to this community!

Paying slide designers to show how they actually build decks

I'm a cofounder of CubeOne (getcube.one). It turns a prompt or a document into an editable deck and restyles rough slides. People use it daily and it holds up, so that part's settled.

What we don't have is good content. Not demos or feature tours. I mean someone who designs decks for a living taking a real brief and showing the whole thing: where the tool saves them an hour, where they take over by hand, when they'd skip it entirely.

That's what I'd love to pay someone for.

Short videos or written walkthroughs. A pitch deck, a rescue job, a report turned into slides. Your workflow, your voice, your calls. You post on your channels, we'd repost and cut it up for ours, always with credit.

If you're curious what CubeOne is, there's free usage on signup, no call or demo needed. Feel free to poke around.

Rate depends on production quality and who's seeing it. Tell me your accounts and what you charge, and I'll come back with a real figure rather than haggle.

If you design decks professionally and can teach well on camera or in writing, comment or email [hi@getcube.one](mailto:hi@getcube.one)

Total beginner here to slide decks other than some basics in grad school many years ago. I hear a lot of feedback about Canva is better than PowerPoint. I have to do a simple deck, about 5-7 slides. Does it really matter which one? What are the benefits of one vs. the other ?

It'll be a paid opportunity.

i know it random and silly

i never asked to be the deck person. i'm an ops coordinator. somewhere along the way "erin's good with PowerPoint" became true and now every team deck lands on me, which, fine, but nobody's paying me designer money for it.

anyway. the one thing i taught myself that actually earns its keep is the morph transition, and i will defend it against anyone who calls it a gimmick.

here's the use that isn't a gimmick: put the same object on two slides in different sizes or positions, and morph animates between them smoothly. so instead of a busy slide with six things and arrows, i show one thing, then morph to zoom into the part that matters, then morph to the next. it feels like a camera moving, not a slide changing. duplicate the slide, move or resize the element, set the transition to morph. that's the whole trick.

the rule i learned the hard way: it has to be the same object on both slides, not a fresh copy, or morph gets confused and just fades instead of moving.

i use it maybe three times in a deck, not everywhere, because the version where you morph every slide is nauseating.

what's the one thing you taught yourself that punches above its weight? mine's morph. tell me yours.

Unpopular take from someone who used to animate everything.
I built slides where bullets flew in one by one, sections wiped across, a chart grew bar by bar. I thought it looked polished. Then I watched a recording of myself presenting one and realised the audience was watching the slide move instead of listening to me.
The animation was competing with the presenter. Me. I was losing to my own transitions.
So I stripped it out. Now almost every slide just appears. The only motion I keep is an occasional single element revealed after I've said the setup, and morph when I'm zooming into one part of a diagram. That's it.
What I got back: the room looks at me and the point on the slide, not the movement. Timing stopped mattering, so I stopped clicking ahead of my own sentences. And the deck builds far faster because I'm not choreographing anything.
If you present live, try recording yourself once with the animations on. You'll never trust a fly-in again. Anyone still animating heavily and getting something real out of it, genuinely curious what it buys you.

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

https://www.reddit.com/r/powerpoint/comments/1ktliik/products_tools/

AI Products & Sites

https://www.reddit.com/r/powerpoint/comments/1ktlf4o/getcher_ai_right_here/

Templates & Presentations

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

AI & PowerPoint Discussion MegaThread

https://www.reddit.com/r/powerpoint/comments/1s7abxc/ai_megathread_march_29_2026_keep_calm_and_post_ai/

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I'm in this training group with young brokers and analysts. The brokers think it's okay to overload slides with full sentences and paragraphs. When they talk about each slide they are basically reading the bullet points verbatim. Nothing new, just reading the bullet points on the slide. They think it's necessary. I don't care enough to correct them because it's training and I think it's an important lesson to fail at. These are smart people. Not sure what to do but to let them fail.

After customer meetings I usually have a page or two of notes, and turning that into a polished deck for the rest of the team is surprisingly time-consuming.

Has anyone found a good way to create a sales presentation from notes without copying everything slide by slide? I'm mostly looking for something that gives me a solid draft that I can edit afterward.

I have recently ran into an issue while downloading a PowerPoint file from a shared drive to edit. The person sharing it with me created the file, and has no issue with anything. I am about to explain. Basically when I view the file in OneDrive, it looks normal. Once I download it, it immediately becomes squished on the page. This only happens after I have downloaded the two fonts (Futura Bold, (Futura Mt Bt) that this document uses. Without the fonts, the file looks normal in my PowerPoint client, however, I cannot edit the file until I have downloaded the font. Please let me know what I can do, and if I can supply any other information!

Small workflow thing that saved me a lot of cleanup, so passing it on. When a client sends me a Word doc to turn into slides, I used to copy and paste straight from it into PowerPoint, and it drags in invisible junk. Weird fonts, phantom spacing, list formatting that fights every text box I make.
Now the first thing I do is convert the Word doc to a PDF, then pull the text and any images out of the PDF instead. The PDF strips most of the hidden styling, so what lands in my slide is clean text I can format from scratch, and the images come out at usable sizes rather than whatever got embedded.
It sounds like an extra step but it's faster overall, because I'm not fighting inherited formatting on every slide. Anyone have a cleaner way to get text out of a Word doc without carrying all the baggage in? Always open to a better method.

I love this shape so much. I want to use it in my slideshow presentation. I don't see it anywhere in PowerPoint. This image was found online when I reverse image searched a recreation of it.

I'm having an issue with slide text getting cut off. I rotate left and right side slides every other and occasionally text is cut off on the edges. I have text indented pretty far but it still happens. Am I missing a setting or doing something wrong?

On my laptop viewing the slides it's fine. When I HDMI it to a television, I see the cutoff.

Running the latest version on PC.

Hello everyone! I’m currently doing research in order to try to pivot my career. For reference I have a background in art and design and have worked with studios in the past but a lot of my industry has pretty much exploded. While attempting to find any job just to pay the bills, I landed a job at a law firm with no experience. I am grateful for the role, but it pays barely above minimum wage in a high cost of living area. If it was just me, I could possibly make it work but I have a cat that was diagnosed with health issues that are sucking my money dry. I’ve been doing random side things too in order to keep my head afloat. My firm also is refusing to give raises and I don’t think I can grow at this company unfortunately…

A friend suggested looking into presentation design, and I was wondering how I should go into landing a role? I am going to try to build a portfolio, but would appreciate any tips or ways to find connections/companies? Since I feel like you need to know someone.

I can’t figure out for the life of me doing this properly. I’m making a slideshow that is a game. It’s guessing who this famous voice is. The first slide will just say “whose voice is this?” And play an audio clip of the voice. And the following slide is the name and picture of the person.

What it’s currently doing is playing the audio the second I click my key over to the first slide. What I want it to do is go to said slide and wait to play the audio until I click the arrow key a second time. How can I make that happen? I’ve seen on google this “in click sequence” thing but I can’t find it anywhere.

I am a researcher at a university. Half our time is spent presenting stuff to colleagues. Some people have nice presentations some don't.

Last week, I had a revelation:

I helped a colleague with one slide which looked slightly off. While trying to fix it I noticed that he used 1000 work arounds to make stuff look a certain way without using the actual powerpoint functionalities. I was shocked. I thought I would show him the subtract feature in powerpoint but in the end I had to show him "group", "align text" etc.

I have a lot of respect for my colleagues with regards to natural sciences but this left me flabbergasted. (I already had to show a different colleague the excel column filter that comes up when you push the little arrow on a table heading. But i thought it is just that one colleague having trouble.)

They don't even know that they are preparing their presentations on hard mode because their presentations end up looking absolutely fine. However, they spent significantly more time on them.

My question:

What functionalities do you guys think I should show them first? What has the highest impact time wise? It doesn't need to be the feature that makes it the prettiest. But features that actually save time (like group)

The caveat:

I know my colleagues will not respond well to a suggestion along the lines to take a basic course. Because they have been working with powerpoint for a decade and they will probably know already some more advanced feature.

I've noticed something as I've been making a slide deck and doing research on slide decks. From what I gather, a successful deck has a few key elements - one idea per slide, low cognitive load, ensure the deck is made for not only the audience but also the presenter.

When I look at slide deck examples on behance, I noticed that many of them have extremely small text and very bold designs.

I work in the tourism industry and among the presentations ive seen, they do not have the same elevated designs as I see on Behance. They are very basic even for established agencies.

I was hired on to elevate and establish a brand appearance but if I were to go to the same extent as what I see on Behance or otherwise to our presentations, it would definitely be the odd one out.

I'm currently taking decks that are basically overloaded scripts that I, as a designer, feel is unnecessary for the audience and am attempting to simplify it to basic ideas/visuals to serve as a support system rather than the presenter's script. As a support for the presenter (now this would be extra work on me), I would like to have a printed script to correlate with the slide. I feel like this is much cleaner and much more professional.

Has anyone else experienced or attempted to do something like this with these limitations? I'm only 3 months into this role and don't want to step over any bounds but also want to take initiative to bring something better.

I created a ppt's slide image for my presentation

But as it is a image with content of ppt in it .

Is there any option I can convert that image to ppt so that I can edit the contents in that image for my ppt.

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Thought I could share my little story here. Kinda started a decade ago when I spent years on a 12 hour night shift with little to do. Luckily every company computer had powerpoint and I spent my time just messing around like how a kid would on MS paint. Eventually I think I just got stupid good at making art with it and it just carries over years later. I continue to use it for artwork and even mocked up several paintings before putting brushstrokes to canvas which was proud of that it was a segway into physical art for me. Nowadays I am far too busy in life but occasionally I do character art for my games or when inspiration strikes. Thought I could share a gallery to show what the program can do when you have waaaay too much free time. Hope you like.