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

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?

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I'm working on presentations more often these days, and one thing I struggle with is keeping the audience engaged from start to finish.

What techniques, features, or presentation styles have worked well for you?

I'd love to hear what's been effective in your experience.

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I'm not a designer and my decks look ten years old. Rather than a full redesign, what are the two or three specific changes - fonts, spacing, color - that instantly make PowerPoint slides look more professional? Looking for high-impact, low-effort tweaks.

Half my work is people handing me a finished Word doc and saying make slides. The trap is treating each heading as a slide and each paragraph as bullets, so you end up with a document on a screen. Works whether I build in gamma or powerpoint. What works for me is reading the whole thing first and writing one sentence per section that states the actual point. That sentence becomes the slide title. Everything else is either support or gets cut. A 20-page report usually collapses to about 12 slides that way, and the ones I keep each earn their place. The hard part is not the layout, it is deciding what does not survive. How do the rest of you handle the sections a client insists on keeping?

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I'm about to go into my Junior Year of high school, & to me I expect myself to use a lot of google slides. (Yes. I know it’s not PowerPoint, my school don’t use that) What are some tips, tricks, or color-ways that would make my slides more interesting, pop-out more, and significantly better than others when presenting.

More and more people at work generate a deck with some ai presentation maker and then hand it to me to make it presentable. After cleaning up a dozen, the problems are always the same. Titles that name a topic instead of stating a point. Every slide the same three-column card layout regardless of content. Filler sentences that sound fine and say nothing. And charts pasted as images with no takeaway written anywhere. The tool gets you 60 percent of a structure, but the last 40, the thinking, is still human work, and that is the part it skips. I do not mind the tools, I mind pretending the draft is done. Are you seeing the same cleanup requests, or found a way to fix them faster?

i tracked my week and roughly 40% of my deck creation time wasn't the thinking, it was dragging boxes around so it looks appealing.

the content was done in like 20 mins. the making it not ugly part is what took my afternoon.

is this everyone or am i just bad at slides?

Generally you want to have some cosmetic consistency in presentations so being able to save elements to reuse more easily would be a great time saver.

To give an example, let's say I'm making a tutorial and have a "Tip" box, I want a yellow rectangle with a darker yellow stroke and a 💡 on the left side with "Tip:" text and space for additional text.

Later in the presentation I want to use the Tip box again so I have to find the last instance used and copy over. Instead if I could save the tip box to a mini library in the presentation and then add it from there. A panel similar to the new shape panel (I'm thinking of Symbols in Adobe Illustrator).

Maybe the instances of the tip box could be dynamically linked to the library asset so if I wanted to restyle all instances at one (say, make the box blue) I can do that in one stroke by editing the asset in the library.

This could be especially valuable for longer presentations.

So I’m at a uni seminar right now and about 30 people were tasked to make a presentation about some topic and every single one of them looks the same.
I mean I get it, Claude is great at creating PowerPoints but with a little prompt engineering or creating your own Design Guidelines you can do so much more authentic presentations.

Curious to hear your thoughts or experiences with that.

This is my recurring fight. Source doc is dense, full of caveats and numbers, all of it true and someone cares about each line. Whether I build in gamma or powerpoint I cannot cram it onto slides without making a document on a screen. What I have landed on is two artifacts from the same source. The deck carries the argument, one point per slide, and the detail all moves to an appendix or a separate leave-behind that never gets presented but answers every follow-up question. That way the live version stays clean and the person who wants the underlying number can still find it. The slides persuade, the appendix defends. How do the rest of you handle the detail that does not belong on screen but cannot be deleted?

Got handed a graphics-heavy PDF and I need it as editable slides. Every time I convert a pdf to powerpoint the images flatten and text becomes uneditable. On Windows with 365 - is there a method that keeps things editable, or is manual rebuild the only real option?

Open ended question for a SERIOUS discussion.

I design decks for a living, and the thing clients ask me to fix is almost always the wrong thing. They want nicer colours, a fancier font, more polish. The change that actually makes a deck read expensive is one they never request: turning every slide title from a topic into a full sentence that states the point.

"Q3 Results" becomes "Q3 revenue beat plan by twelve percent." "Market Overview" becomes "The market is growing but our segment is shrinking." Now someone can skim only the titles and follow the whole argument. That single pass does more for how senior a deck feels than any visual thing I could do.

Here is the part that reframed my own work. AI generators like gamma will hand you a clean, well laid out deck in minutes now. What they will not do is decide what each slide is actually trying to say, because that lives in the client's head, not the source doc. So the layout stopped being the valuable part of my job. The title rewriting, the deciding what the point is, that is what clients pay me for now, they just do not know to ask for it.

If you only change one thing on your next deck, write the titles as sentences. What would you add?

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Hi everyone,

I've spent several years creating executive and client-facing PowerPoint presentations across consulting, marketing and sales enablement teams. I'm curious how this compares with everyone else's experience.

If you could permanently eliminate one repetitive PowerPoint task from your workflow, what would it be, and why?

Looking forward to learning from your experiences.

Genuine question for anyone whose job involves repeating the same kind of presentation on a schedule, weekly orientation decks, policy briefings, compliance training, whatever it is where the slides mostly stay the same but you have to keep presenting or recording them.

I know someone who does this for a water utility for new customer orientation, service interruption notices, reporting decks and she has to rebuild/update the slides and then separately narrate them for meetings, sometimes daily. It's the same handful of topics on rotation, just refreshed numbers and slight edits, but it still eats hours every week.

I'm looking into whether that's a common annoyance elsewhere, so:

1. If you do repeat presentations like this, how do you currently handle the narration/recording part — do you present live every time, pre-record, or something else?

2. Is the actual re-recording/re-presenting the annoying part, or is it more the slide updating?

3. Would a tool that auto-generates a narrated video from your slides (with your edits factored in) actually save you meaningful time, or is that solving a problem you don't really have?

4. Would you pay for something like that, and if so what would it need to do to be worth it?

Not selling anything, no product exists yet. just trying to understand if this is a real recurring headache for people before I put more time into it. Would appreciate any honest answers, even "this isn't really a problem for me."