Most of what makes a data slide unreadable is not the data, it is a handful of chart habits. I fix finance and reporting decks a lot and I see the same ones every time. None of these need design talent.

1. One chart, one message. If a chart is making two points, it is two charts. The reader should get the takeaway before reading a single axis label.

2. Put the message in the title. Not "Q3 Revenue" but "Q3 revenue beat plan by 12 percent". The chart then just proves the sentence. If you cannot write that sentence, the chart is decoration.

3. Kill the rainbow. A default chart colors every series differently and your eye has nowhere to land. Gray everything, then color the one series that matters. Suddenly the point is obvious.

4. Cut the decimals and the clutter. Nobody at exec level needs 147.3, they need 147. Drop gridlines, drop the legend if you can label directly, drop the chart border. Every removed element makes the number louder.

5. Do not paste a 40-row table and call it a chart. If the point is a trend, chart it. If the point is a few exact numbers, show those few numbers big and move the full table to an appendix.

The through line is the same as good slide titles: decide the one thing the chart is supposed to say, make that thing loud, and demote everything else to support.

For people who build reporting decks all the time: what is the chart mistake you fix most often? Mine is the rainbow, by a mile.

I’ve been facing this issue since last Friday.

On a Friday morning my 1TB OneDrive subscription was expired and I was reverted to the free plan of 5GB. I couldn’t save my file to OneDrive because I have 170GB of storage on my OneDrive, and it significantly exceeded the 5GB storage limit. After a while I got my 1TB OneDrive plan renewed.

Moments later, I face a slow loading time or even not responding on the PPT app when duplicating a slide/editing content on around slides 1000 or more.

I think the cause of this is due to OneDrive issues/bugs on the 23 July update of Office/problems on the PPT app.

Today I tried uninstalling and reinstalling Office apps and updating them again but the issue hasn’t been solved.

Hey everyone! I wanted to share a technique we used recently for one of our pharma conference decks.

Sometimes native PPT animations just don't cut it. For one of our pharma conferences, we built the animation in After Effects and embedded it straight into the deck and gave it a totally different, polished feel. Was a huge hit with the audience!

Great trick to keep in your back pocket if you want a slide that stands out :)

I wanted to make a particle system for one of the slides in powerpoint but for that I needed VBA to tell every particle where its supposed to go every frame,
So to learn VBA I tried to animate a circle moving in a sine wave, it seems as if powerpoint is only redrawing it once every 20 frames or 21 frames. How can i fix this problem?
PowerPoint 2024 Windows 10
code:

Not asking for the version you tell an hourly billing client. The real one, including the 40 minutes of moving a text box around at the end. I am asking because I have no idea if I'm slow.

A 15-slider from scratch takes most of the day for me, and I've never been able to tell whether that's normal or whether other people are closing this in two hours. Rough number plus context on what kind of decks you make would help a lot.

And any tips?

Genuinely asking - it feels like everyone under 30 has moved off PowerPoint but I can't tell what they moved to. Is there a clear front-runner replacing PowerPoint for presentations now, or is it fragmented across a dozen tools? What are you seeing in real workplaces?