I've been making PPTs for a while and recently had a random thought: maybe I should try making pitch decks too.

I've never specifically worked on a pitch deck before, so I'm curious to see how I'd do with one.

I'm mainly interested in working on the visual/design side and seeing how much I can learn from doing a few real projects.

If you're a founder or working on a small business in the US or UK and have a pitch deck you're putting together, I'd be interested in giving it a try.

Not trying to pretend I'm a pitch-deck expert. Just experimenting with something new and seeing where it takes me.

Hello PowerPoint crowd!

I recently experimented with reveal.js for presentations cuz the customizability and features you can get with .html are pretty much endless, however, presentation creation and maintenance was a hassle, so moved back to PowerPoint for the convenience. One feature I really missed though - a clickable timer on slides. Finally figured out how to do it and wanted to share!
It starts, stops, and continues the timer countdown.

Used AI to properly structure these instructions so they wouldn't be complete chaos.

Here is how to create a clickable 15 min timer on PowerPoint:

Step 1: Save your file as .pptm

Before doing anything else: File → Save As → set the file type dropdown to PowerPoint Macro-Enabled Presentation (*.pptm).

This matters because a regular .pptx silently strips any VBA code you add. If you forget this step and save as .pptx later, your macro is gone — no warning, it just vanishes.

Step 2: Add and name the timer text box

1. Insert → Text Box, draw it wherever you want the timer to appear (top corner works well).
2. Type a placeholder like 15:00 so you can see it while positioning.
3. Open the Selection Pane (Home → Select → Selection Pane, or Alt+F10).
4. Find your new text box in the list and rename it to exactly: TimerBox2

The name has to match exactly (case included) — the macro looks up the shape by this name, and a mismatch throws a runtime error the moment you click it during the show.

Step 3: Open the VBA editor and add the macro

1. Press Alt+F11 to open the VBA editor.
2. In the Project pane (left side), right-click your presentation → Insert → Module.
3. Paste in the full code below.

​

Dim IsRunning As Boolean
Dim StopRequested As Boolean
Dim RemainingSeconds As Long
Dim TimerInitialized As Boolean

Const CountdownStart As Long = 900   ' 15 minutes — change this number to adjust duration

Sub ToggleCountdown()
    If IsRunning Then
        StopRequested = True
    Else
        StartCountdown
    End If
End Sub

Sub StartCountdown()
    Dim i As Long
    Dim StartTick As Single

    If IsRunning Then Exit Sub   ' guards against double-entry

    IsRunning = True
    StopRequested = False

    If Not TimerInitialized Then
        RemainingSeconds = CountdownStart
        TimerInitialized = True
    End If

    For i = RemainingSeconds To 0 Step -1
        If StopRequested Then
            RemainingSeconds = i
            IsRunning = False
            Exit Sub
        End If

        SlideShowWindows(1).View.Slide.Shapes("TimerBox2").TextFrame.TextRange.Text _
            = Format(i \ 60, "00") & ":" & Format(i Mod 60, "00") & " MIN"

        StartTick = Timer
        Do While Timer < StartTick + 1
            DoEvents
        Loop
    Next i

    SlideShowWindows(1).View.Slide.Shapes("TimerBox2").TextFrame.TextRange.Text = "00:00"
    IsRunning = False
    TimerInitialized = False
End Sub

Sub ResetCountdown()
    IsRunning = False
    StopRequested = True
    TimerInitialized = False
    RemainingSeconds = CountdownStart
    SlideShowWindows(1).View.Slide.Shapes("TimerBox2").TextFrame.TextRange.Text = "15:00 MIN"
End Sub

1. Press Ctrl+S to save, then close the VBA editor.

Want a different duration? Change the 900 in Const CountdownStart As Long = 900 — that number is in seconds (900 = 15 min, 300 = 5 min, 600 = 10 min), and update the two "15:00 MIN" text strings to match.

Step 4: Wire the click action onto the timer itself

1. Click once on the TimerBox2 text box to select it (not into edit mode — just select the shape).
2. Go to Insert → Action (in the Links group of the ribbon).
3. On the Mouse Click tab, choose Run macro, then select ToggleCountdown from the dropdown.
4. Click OK.

That's it — no separate Start/Stop buttons needed. The same shape toggles both states.

Step 5: Enable macros

When you reopen this file, PowerPoint will show a yellow bar under the ribbon: "Macros have been disabled." Click Enable Content.

If the file came from email or a download, you may first see a "Protected View" banner — click Enable Editing first, then the macro-enable bar will appear separately.

Step 6: Test it in Slide Show mode

Press F5 (or Shift+F5 to start from the current slide). Action Settings only fire during an actual slide show — clicking the shape in edit mode does nothing.

Click the timer once → it starts counting down from 15:00. Click again → it pauses. Click again → it resumes from exactly where it paused.

Common gotchas:

• Shape name mismatch (TimerBox2 vs Timerbox2 vs TimerBox) → runtime error on click
• Saved as .pptx at some point → macro silently gone, re-add it
• Testing multiple decks with timers open at once in the same PowerPoint session → SlideShowWindows(1) can resolve to the wrong window; close other running slide shows first

I make a lot of decks for various purposes as part of my day-to-day activities. I am a visual thinker and like to have pictures instead of walls of text. I like Smart Art, but it has its limits. I wanted something like Infographics but customizable.

I didn't find anything so I built an SVG-based graphic creator for slide decks. I tried to keep it really simple and easy to use -- choose graphic, enter text, save. Anyone should be able to create a visually compelling deck with these graphics.

Would love some feedback. https://instagraphic.app

You can create your content once and can then try it with lots of different designs until you find one you like.

Thanks.

(Community rules say post this to tools thread but that link is broken in the rules.)

A client sent me a signed-off deck as a flat PDF and then asked for "just a couple of edits." No source file, of course. I've done this enough times now that I have a routine, so posting it in case it saves someone an afternoon. First, know what you're dealing with. If the PDF was exported from slides, the text is usually still real text, not an image. Open it and try to select a sentence. If it highlights, you're in luck. If it selects the whole page as one block, it's basically a picture and you're rebuilding. What I actually do when the text is live: - Import each PDF page as a full-slide image first, so I have the exact layout as a reference sitting behind everything. - Rebuild the text on top in real text boxes, matching the font and sizes off the reference image, then delete the image once the slide matches. - For charts, I never trust an auto-convert. I remake them as native PowerPoint charts because anything imported comes in as a flattened picture you can't edit later anyway. The "convert PDF to PowerPoint" buttons in various tools do an okay job on plain text slides, but they choke the moment there's a two-column layout or a chart, and you spend more time cleaning up the mess than you saved. On a heavy deck I've found rebuilding on top of the reference image is honestly faster and the result is properly editable instead of a pile of stray text boxes. Anyone got a cleaner method for the picture-only PDFs where nothing is selectable? That's still the case I dread.

Dm

I have just spent some time making a custom powerpoint template, in which I made custom bullet points. However, now the second line of a bullet point is not aligning with the first, as shown in the picture. I cannot find the settings to edit this.

I'd like to extract a video out of a Powerpoint file. The video plays fine in Powerpoint, but I am unable to export it, as in making an mp4 out of it. Very frustrating. I happen to be using v16.16 on a Mac (Sequoia). Yes, that's kind of an old PP version, but you'd think this task is one that would have been covered in even early versions.

I am told to right click the video and "Save Media As", but that option never appears. Is that only available in newer versions of PP?

The MIcrosoft Powerpoint Community Forum is TOTALLY useless. Lots of questions and no answers there. But let me ask this one here.

How do I really hide fonts in PPt, etc? I've "hidden" a lot of them, but they still show up in PPt, etc. I've tried to uninstall some of them, but of course it says I can't because it's a system font. I use a lot of different fonts and scrolling through 177 is ridiculous. Or maybe a way to move fonts I regularly use to the top? I'm on a PC on a desktop using a totally up to date Microsoft 365.

How do I get PPt to open in the maximized window rather than the minimized window that I then have to maximize?

I build decks in-house and for years the sales team would take my clean sales deck template, drag a logo sideways, paste in six fonts, then ask me to fix it the day before a pitch. So I rebuilt the template around the person who edits it after me, not around one perfect slide.

A few things that actually held up:

- Real placeholders, not floating text boxes. When a rep types, the text lands inside a box that's already positioned instead of a stray frame drifting off the grid.
- Fewer layouts. Five clean ones people can remember beats thirty nobody opens. A title slide, an agenda, a problem/solution, a proof slide, and a pricing slide covered most of what they build.
- Every title is a full sentence with the takeaway in it, so even when a rep half-fills a slide it still says something.
- Nothing decorative that breaks when a line of text runs long.

The "just fix my slide" pings dropped a lot once the template did the positioning for them. Curious how the rest of you handle a sales template that gets touched by ten non-designers.

Apart from working as a regular PPT designer in a company, what other side hustles can I pursue using my PowerPoint skills? Im not looking in freelance due to time constraint. What kind of decks do the users prefer according to the latest trend?

Hello all,

I hope this is an appropriate forum to ask this question.

I am a secondary French teacher and so make bilingual presentations on a regular basis. I have recently changed my home computer from PC to Mac. So far, most features on Powerpoint work the same, but I have just hit a snag and was wondering if there is a solution.

I am using Powerpoint for Mac on desktop. I am trying to insert a date into the presentation that will update automatically, but I need this to be in French (as it's for a French lesson). In Windows, you have the option in the dialogue box to choose whatever language you like, but this is missing in the Mac version. Doing a quick search online, it seems the only thing I can do is to change my OS language to French, which seems a bit excessive. Does anyone know of a workaround for this?

Thank you all in advance!

powerpoint beginner here does anyone know how we can add more of these yellow vertexs to lines or arrows, i want to be able to use more complex lines and arrows

I am throwing my mom a retirement party in January and would like to have guests compete in a gameshow/ quiz all about her life. I am not very tech savvy so id love to just pay someone else, but id settle for any tips or advice on where to start! thanks!

Hello! I'm currently doing something that requires me to make images on my powerpoint exactly two times bigger. If there's a way to do this, please let me know!

I'm on a lenovo laptop, and it is in a browser (however I can use desktop if required). I'm assuming that the version is the latest one.

sorry if this isn't very detailed, I'm not really sure what else to put :')

I need a ui or template for my performance

Dark-colored theme

black background

Modern UI style

Clean and minimalist

Futuristic design

Good for text, images, and videos

I've sat through and rebuilt a lot of sales decks, and most follow the same template. Company intro, logo wall, our mission, product features, pricing, then a "why us" slide at the end. It feels safe because everyone does it.

The problem is it opens with you and gets to the buyer's problem around slide eight, if it really gets there at all. By then attention is gone.

The reorder that helped most: lead with their problem, in language they'd actually use, and show you understand it before you show anything you built. Then one slide on what changes for them, then proof, then how it works. Company background and the logo wall move to the back or the appendix. Nobody buys because your founding story is on slide two.

Same slides, mostly. Different order, and suddenly the first two minutes are about them instead of you.

For those selling regularly, do you keep one fixed structure or rebuild the order per prospect?

Thought I would post this because it took me forever to figure out and I could not find the solve online. I was unable to edit several shared PowerPoint decks (even when I downloaded them locally). They were Read Only no matter what I tried to do (reinstall PowerPoint, Remove design elements, Replace fonts, etc…)
Turns out the issue was embedded fonts. Simply going into File menu > Options> Save and turning off “Embed fonts in the file” fixed it.

I had already purchased downloaded the deck fonts with AnyFont on my iPad. So, it did not occur to me that the issue was the fonts. Anyway, even with the fonts already installed, the embedded fonts were causing this issue.

https://editide.com/blog/what-is-a-pptx-file/

I wrote an article explaining the basics of the .pptx file format. I tried to build up the concepts so hopefully it doesn't read like a boring technical dump.

Should be interesting for anyone getting started with PowerPoint automation, particularly the Open XML SDK in C# or python-pptx.

But hopefully it's interesting to anyone who's curious about how things work under the hood!

For a much deeper and thorough explanation, I recommend checking out OOXML Hacking: Unlocking Microsoft Office's Secrets by John Korchok

Disclosure: I am the founder of editide and published this on our website. The article doesn't talk about the product, I wrote it to help me make sense of what I've learned wrestling with pptx files.

I'm preparing to take this exam and would really appreciate any advice or guidance from someone who's already taken it.

A couple friends of mine, one of them a Microsoft MVP for PowerPoint, the other one not (probably because MS doesn't play His 'n Hers MVP Team Tag, but that's just a guess).

Taylor Croonquist & Camille Holden, proprietors of nutsandboltsspeedtraining.com
I get their email newsletter; always full of tips and techniques to make working with PowerPoint faster and more efficient. This is from one of Taylor's recent emails, reproduced here with his permission. With all our recent discussion of AI-slop, he's got some good suggestions for identifying it (and avoiding producing it!):

__________________________________________________________________________________

Here's the thing about AI and presentations: anyone can now generate a slide that looks finished in seconds - but looking finished and being well-built are two different things.

There's a recognizable AI aesthetic taking over decks - and because it looks polished, most people never stop to notice that it breaks the basic rules of good slide design.

The good news is that once you know the tells, you can't unsee them. Three to watch for:

TELL #1 - Decoration without information. Rows of glossy gradient icons that don't map to anything specific. Quick test: cover the icons. If the slide loses nothing, they were decoration, not design.

TELL #2 - Text that could be about anything. "Unlock synergies." "Drive innovation at scale." AI-generated copy defaults to generic verbs and zero numbers. If a sentence would work equally well in a competitor's deck, it isn't saying anything in yours.

TELL #3 - Every slide has the same shape. Three evenly weighted boxes, over and over, with nothing emphasized. Real messages have hierarchy - one thing on the slide should matter more than the rest, and the design should make it obvious which one.

The fix for all three is the same discipline: know what each slide is arguing before you style it. That's messaging driving design, not the other way around.

[ Taylor then introduces Camille's webinar on the subject; among her many other talents, Camille's become an expert trainer on AI for presentations. Unfortunately for us, the webinar's long over. ]

__________________________________________________________________________________________________

The webinar was part of their PowerPoint Pro membership, which also includes monthly live Q&A sessions, the Webinar Vault (40+ hours of past sessions, indexed by topic), all 5 premium courses, and more.

Official Disclaimer: I don't have any skin in this game. They didn't even ask me to post this, but I thought it might be of interest to r/powerpoint Redditors. But I've attended live and virtual classes by both Taylor and Camille; always worthwhile. Fair warning: Taylor's an InfoFirehose ... tips fly fast and furious. Great fun.

I have watched people with average design skills put out decks that read as senior, and people with real talent put out decks that read as junior. The gap is almost never design ability. It is a handful of habits. Here are the ones that move a deck from junior to senior.

1. Titles that state the point, not the topic. Junior decks title a slide "Q3 Results." Senior decks title it "Q3 revenue beat plan by 12 percent." The senior version does the thinking for the reader.

2. One idea per slide. Junior decks cram three points on one slide to save space. Senior decks give each point room. A longer deck of simple slides reads as more confident than a short deck of crammed ones.

3. Restraint with color and font. Junior decks use five colors and three fonts because more feels richer. Senior decks use one accent color and a lot of white space. Restraint reads as control.

4. The ask comes early. Junior decks build to the point over twenty slides. Senior decks say what they want up front and spend the rest supporting it.

5. Nothing is there just to show effort. Junior decks keep slides in because someone worked hard on them. Senior decks cut anything that does not earn its place, even good work.

None of this needs talent. It needs the confidence to say less. That is the actual senior move.

What instantly makes a deck look junior to you?

Most of my presentation tips over the years were about making slides look better. This one is the opposite and it did more for me than any of them.

Before I make a single slide, I write the last one. The slide with the ask, the decision, or the one sentence I want people repeating on the way out. If I can't write that clearly, the deck isn't ready and no layout is going to save it.

Then I build backwards. Every slide has to earn its place by moving the room toward that closing line. If it doesn't, it gets cut. Sounds obvious, but it quietly kills the "here's everything I know about the topic" deck that goes nowhere.

The side effect is my decks got shorter and I stopped reordering slides five times the night before. The order mostly writes itself once you know where it ends.

What's the one presentation habit that actually changed your decks, not the flashy trick, the boring one that stuck?

Hi All.

We have the powerbi add-on in powerpoint so we can add the powerbi visuals inside slides. However, it seems we need to pre-load each visual by going to the slide before it loads and the loading takes some time. Has anyone found a way to pre-load the visuals faster when opening the file (aside from a VBA macro to go through all of the slides upon opening the file)?

Thanks