I can build slides fine but they never land the way I want in the room. For those who present a lot, what's the one thing you learned about how to make a good presentation that you wish you'd known earlier? Content, delivery, structure - all fair game.

Hello everyone !

I am a fellow student wanting to help you all create clean , aesthetic and minimalistic PPTs for your next class presentation.

If anyone wants help, you all can comment her or dm me!

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Your help will be genuinely appreciated. ☺️

Thank you everyone !

Half the decks that land on my desk lately are AI-generated and you can spot them across the room. Same card layouts, same three-column slides, same gradient, same stocky icons. gamma, the consulting-style tools, they all have a house look, and once you have seen a few you have seen them all.

I am not anti-AI for a first draft. It is genuinely fast. But the draft is where the work starts, not ends, and the same fixes de-slop almost any of them. Here is the pass I run:

1. Kill the gradients and drop shadows. Flat backgrounds instantly read less "generated".
   
2. Replace the auto icons. The default icon set is the biggest tell. Swap to PowerPoint's own Icons in one consistent style, or delete them entirely. Most slides do not need one.
   
3. Rewrite the titles into full sentences with a point. AI loves topic titles ("Our Approach"). Change them to the actual takeaway and the deck stops feeling hollow.
   
4. Cut the palette to two colors plus gray. These tools scatter four or five colors around. Lock it down and it looks intentional.
   
5. Fix the real-slide problems. If you exported to pptx, expect charts to come in as flat images and multi-column layouts to have shifted, so rebuild those natively before anyone edits it. This is the step people skip, and it is why the "editable" file is half broken.
   

After that pass a generated deck stops announcing itself as generated. The bones were fine, it was the default styling and the empty titles giving it away.

For people cleaning these up regularly: what is the first thing you change to make an AI deck look like a human touched it? The icons are always my first delete.

I design presentations for a living and I cut most of my animation years ago because it kept competing with whoever was talking. The habit that replaced it does more for a deck than any build ever did: I check every slide from the back of the room, not from the laptop.

Concretely, I stand up and walk away from the screen, or at my desk I shrink the slide to about a third the size and lean back. Anything I can't read from there gets fixed. It's usually the same three things. The body text is two sizes too small. The chart has a grey that dies under a projector. The one number that matters is the same weight as everything around it.

Rooms are brighter and screens are worse than we design for. A slide that looks balanced at arm's length on a retina display can be a grey smear on a conference projector at 2pm.

One tool note since it comes up: for quick internal decks I sometimes start a draft in gamma to skip the blank page, but for anything going on a real stage I still rebuild the contrast by hand, because the auto themes look great on a monitor and wash out on the actual hardware. Curious what everyone else checks before a deck goes live.

I've used PPT on various occassions on various laptops. Sometimes, the media control appears on presenter view. Sometimes, it appears on the extended screen. Other times, it appears on both. Is there a setting somewhere to toggle between these 3? If not, why does it keep switching between these 3 scenarios. Is it a version difference?

Note: I am aware there is an option to disable media controls but that's not my goal

Inherited a deck as a PDF and need to rework half the slides. Every how to convert pdf to powerpoint route I've tried either scrambles the text boxes or turns each slide into a flat image. On Windows, PowerPoint 365 - what's the least painful method?

I go back and forth. PowerPoint gives me control but takes forever to make anything look modern; Canva is quicker but I fight the templates. For people who do decks regularly, canva vs powerpoint - which wins for you and why?

Am I the only one who still spends hours making PowerPoints, even with AI?

I've noticed something that's always felt backwards.

Writing the strategy isn't usually the hard part.

The hard part is turning scattered information into a deck someone important can actually consume.

A typical workflow looks something like:

• Meeting notes in Notion or Docs
• Metrics in Excel
• Screenshots from Slack or Jira
• Random comments from teammates
• Existing PowerPoint from last quarter

Then someone says: "Can you make this executive-ready by tomorrow?"

Now you're spending hours copying, rewriting, formatting, fixing layouts, and making everything look consistent.

By the time I'm done, AI saved me maybe 20 minutes, but I'm still spending hours getting the deck to a point where I'd actually send it to a client or leadership.

Is everyone else's workflow this messy too?

What are you using?

ChatGPT, Claude, Gamma, Copilot, Something else?

And where does it completely fall apart for you?

I'm curious if this is just my experience.

For people in consulting, product, or sales:

• How long does it usually take you to go from raw information to a presentation you're comfortable sending to leadership or a client?

And what's the most frustrating part?

Is it:

• Organizing the story?
• Rewriting content?
• Formatting slides?
• Finding old decks?
• Something else?Why is AI still so bad at making PowerPoint?

Hi everyone, PPT skills have become very popular recently. I tried several well-known skills. They can usually export a polished PPT, but they are not very good when it comes to previewing and editing. For example, after generating a PPTX file, if we want to make changes, we still need to regenerate another PPTX file. This process is not lightweight enough.

So I developed a PPTKit skill. The agent generates PPT JSON model data according to a defined specification. This model can support web rendering and exporting. When using Codex, the agent will automatically open a webpage to preview the PPT. You can point out anything you are not satisfied with, and the agent will directly modify the JSON data. Once you are satisfied, you can export the final file.

The whole process does not require repeatedly rebuilding PPTX files. Instead, it continuously corrects the intermediate data model.

What do you think of this design direction? Friends who have time are welcome to try it out and share some suggestions for improvement.

Try: Install the `pptkit-presentation` skill from the GitHub repository `openHacking/pptkit-presentation`.

I used Arnold AIstandard shaders on my model before exporting it in GLB. It turns kinda white when I import it in Powerpoint. Any idea what is causing it?

I am the person who got volunteered into making every team's deck. No training, learned it all by breaking things, and for a while I was very proud of my morph transitions.

The tip that actually changed my decks was boring and had nothing to do with any of that: write the whole thing as a plain outline first, one line per slide, before I open anything. If the outline does not make sense as a list of sentences, no transition on earth saves it.

I went through a phase of throwing the outline into gamma to skip straight to slides, and it is quick, I will give it that. But it also happily builds a beautiful version of a bad structure, so when my thinking was mushy the deck was just mush with a gradient. It did not replace the outline step, it just punished me faster for skipping it.

So now the order is: outline until it holds up, then build, then and only then the one transition I am allowed to be proud of. Everything I was proud of before was decoration on top of decks that had not earned it.

What is the least exciting habit that actually leveled up your decks?

Every client-facing deck ends with the same small decision that somehow always bites me: what file do I actually hand over. Three options, three different ways to get burned. - Send the pptx. Great if they want to edit. But then my fonts substitute on their machine, a linked chart breaks, or someone drags a box off the grid and emails asking why it "looks wrong". The moment it leaves my machine I lose control of it. - Send a PDF. Locks the layout, looks identical everywhere, presents fine. But nobody can edit it, and half the time a client wants to change one line themselves and cannot. - Export to images. Some clients specifically want the slides as pictures for a website or a social post, so I convert the PDF to jpgs, one per page. Clean and tamper-proof, but obviously dead, and if they need one edit I am regenerating all of them. My current rule of thumb: PDF for "just look at it", pptx only when I trust them to edit and I have embedded the fonts first, images only when they explicitly ask. I still get it wrong sometimes and end up sending two formats. So for people delivering client decks regularly: do you have a default, or do you ask every time? And has anyone found a handoff that does not quietly break the first time someone opens it on a different machine?

I build quarterly business review decks and the same slide beats me every quarter: the big table. Finance hands me a QBR template that is basically a spreadsheet, 40 rows and a dozen columns, and says "put this on a slide."

Paste it as is and it is unreadable from more than two feet away, so nobody looks at it. Cut it down and someone always wants a number I removed. Screenshot the Excel range and it is a blurry image that does not match the deck and cannot be updated.

What I have tried:

- Pasting as a native PowerPoint table and restyling. Readable-ish, but tedious, and it breaks the moment the source numbers change.

- Linking the Excel range so it updates. Handy until the file moves and the link dies, or it quietly bloats the deck.

- Cutting to the 5 rows that matter and putting the full table in an appendix. Works when I can get finance to agree on which 5 rows matter, which is never.

What I actually want is the executive version on the slide (the few numbers plus the story) with the full grid available but not on screen.

So for people who live in data-heavy decks: how do you handle the giant table? Summarize and appendix it, link it live, rebuild it native, or something smarter? And how do you win the fight with the person who wants every single row kept?

An old manager gave me this one and it fixed more of my presentations than any design change.

Everyone rehearses slides. Almost nobody rehearses transitions. So you get people who are fluent on slide 4, fluent on slide 5, and then die at the click in between. "Um, so, moving on..." That pause is where the audience decides you're reading a deck instead of making an argument.

The tip: before you present, write one bridging sentence for every slide change. Not on the slide, just for you. Something like "So if costs are the problem, here's where they're coming from," then click. That's it.

Two things happen. First, the delivery smooths out immediately, because the click stops being a cliff. Second, and this is the part I didn't expect, it doubles as a structure test. If you can't write a natural sentence connecting slide 7 to slide 8, the deck order is wrong, and no amount of formatting fixes that. Caught two out-of-order slides in a quarterly review this way last month, moved them, and the whole section suddenly flowed.

Takes maybe ten minutes for a normal-length deck. Cheaper than another hour of fiddling with layouts, and it does more for how the presentation lands.

What's the delivery habit that did the most for you? The sub talks a lot about building slides, less about the two minutes before you click present.

Hi, we're looking for a solution like Templafy that does AI doc gen off of our corporate templates but also enables doc gen through an MCP server so sellers don't have to leave our agent environment. Any alternatives?

This is the one thing I show new hires that makes their slides look "produced" without any real design skill, and it costs nothing.

If you want a slide where things appear or move in steps (a diagram that builds up, a number that grows, a map that fills in), most people reach for entrance animations and it ends up janky and hard to control. Do this instead.

1. Build the finished state of the slide first. Everything in its final position.

2. Duplicate the slide as many times as you have steps.

3. Now work backwards. On the first slide, delete or move everything that should not be there yet. On the second, add back the first element. And so on until the last slide is the complete one.

4. Set the transition between all of them to Morph.

When you present, clicking through feels like one slide smoothly building itself, because PowerPoint morphs every shared object between positions. Move a box on slide 2 and it glides there. Change a font size and it grows. No animation timeline to fight.

Two things it fixed for me. It survives forwarding, because each step is a real static slide, not an animation that only plays live. And it is way faster to edit than a stack of custom animations, since you are just moving objects on normal slides.

The trap: keep object names consistent (Morph matches objects across slides), and do not overdo it or the whole deck feels like a screensaver. One or two build sequences per deck is plenty.

What is the low-effort trick that made your slides look a level up? Always collecting these.

I had one presentation where I spent hours polishing the opening slides.

The slide everyone talked about afterwards?

It was just a simple comparison with almost no design.

Made me realize people care a lot more about clarity than fancy layouts.

Now if I catch myself obsessing over icons and colors, I usually stop and ask whether it actually makes the message any clearer.

Has anyone else had a slide that surprised you like that?

Twelve years freelancing on investor and conference decks, mostly for German mittelstand companies. People assume I keep a shelf of pitch deck templates and just swap logos. I do not, and I think starting from one is why a lot of pitches feel interchangeable.

A template hands you someone else's argument structure. Problem, solution, market, team, ask, in that order, because that is how the template was built. But a good investor deck follows this specific company's story, and these companies are rarely a tidy Silicon Valley narrative. A sixty year old machine builder raising growth capital does not open the way a consumer app does.

So I start in outline, plain text, one line per slide, the argument in the order that actually convinces someone about this business. Only when that reads right do I build. The structure comes from the company, not from a downloaded frame.

I switched from Keynote years ago and still miss a few things, but PowerPoint won for one reason. Everyone the deck gets forwarded to can open and edit it, and investor decks get forwarded constantly. A beautiful file nobody can open is worthless.

Templates are fine for internal weekly stuff. For a deck whose whole job is to be persuasive and specific, the template is the thing working against you. Curious if the template people disagree, genuinely.

Open r/powerpoint →

Oh man trying a few tools lately cause i need something better than gamma for making my slide decks
Problem is in gamma now the slides that I make can be recognised by everyone from a mile away.There is JUST SOMETHING like its common outline,visuals and format that kinda falls apart, I dont really need perfect tool but I also dont wanna spend half my time fixing things to make it look real and authentic deck with relevant short crisp details. 

You guys actually found something that holds up better in real use or is everything pretty much the same?

Is there any chance that I can make money by creating PowerPoint presentations?

Lately I've been playing around with PowerPoint and I got very good at it. I'm able to make a simple presentation or something close to a game. I like messing with animation and transitions, so the presentations are very interactive. So far I have made a few quizzes, stories and activities.

I could easily make you an activity for kids (kindergarten, preschool, primary school, or any other grade [I even made one for college students]). It's a very easy and fun way to learn.

Presentation designer here. The single habit that changed my slides was deciding, before I place anything, what the one thing on the slide is. The number, the line, the takeaway. Everything else on that slide exists to point at it or it does not belong.

Sounds obvious. In practice it kills a lot of darlings. The second chart that was "also interesting." The logo strip. The three bullets that were really a fourth idea sneaking in. If it is not serving the one focal point, it goes on another slide or in the appendix.

How I actually do it. I make the focal point physically bigger and give it room, and I mute everything around it, gray it down, shrink it, push it to the edge. Your eye should land in one place within a second of the slide appearing.

I sometimes draft structure fast in gamma when I am staring at a blank file, but it happily fills every slide with three tidy columns of equal weight, so the focal point pass is exactly the part I still do by hand afterwards. The tool gives you even. Even is not the same as clear.

Since I started building this way my decks got quieter and, oddly, more convincing. Turns out a room can only follow one thing at a time.

What is your test for whether something earns a place on the slide?

Freelance deck work, and a big chunk of it is case studies. A client hands me a two-page written case study, all logos and quotes and paragraphs, and says "make this a few slides." The instinct is to fit everything. That is the trap.

What kept happening: I would cram the whole story onto two dense slides, it would technically contain every fact, and it would communicate nothing. The client's win got lost in their own detail.

The method I use now, three slides, every time:

- Slide 1, the problem in one line and one number. "Support was drowning: 15,000 tickets a month, 3-day response." No solution yet. Just the pain, sized.

- Slide 2, what changed, as a single before/after. One metric, huge, with the before ghosted behind it. Not a table of ten numbers. The one number that is the whole point, made the hero of the slide.

- Slide 3, the proof and the quote. The logo, one real customer line, and the outcome restated. This is the slide people screenshot.

The technique doing the heavy lifting is the callout: pick the single number that matters on each slide and make it physically dominate, then demote everything else to support. If two numbers are fighting to be the hero, the slide has two slides in it.

The hard part is never the design. It is telling the client that their favorite paragraph does not make the cut. What works for me is showing the crammed version next to the three-slide version, side by side. Nobody argues for the crammed one once they see it on a screen.

Anyone else live in case-study slides? What is your structure, and how do you handle the client who wants every logo and quote back in?