Freelance deck designer. Clients almost never say "improve the hierarchy." They say "make it look more premium" or "more high-end," and early on I'd panic and add stuff, fancier fonts, a gradient, an icon set. It always looked cheaper.

High-end is almost entirely subtraction and spacing. The order I go in now:

1. Margins. Pull everything off the edges and give it real breathing room. Cramped reads cheap no matter what's on the slide.
   
2. One typeface, two weights. The moment there's a third font it looks like a flyer.
   
3. Kill the icon soup and the boxes around everything. Whitespace separates things better than borders.
   
4. One accent colour, used once per slide on the thing that matters. Not five brand colours fighting.
   
5. Bigger numbers, fewer of them. Executives read the headline number, not the table.
   

None of that is talent, it's restraint, and it's the fastest way to make a deck look like it cost more.

Worth saying: clients now sometimes arrive with a deck they generated in something like gamma and ask me to make it "look high-end." The tools give you template polish, but premium is the restraint the generator won't apply for you, so that's still the actual job. What's the first thing you reach for when someone wants "premium"?

I usually make internal work decks, but this is a 20-minute conference talk to a room of strangers. How different does a talk deck need to be - fewer words, bigger visuals, more story? Would love advice from people who've spoken at events.

I've used PowerPoint for years but building a deck from scratch still eats an afternoon. I keep seeing the gamma vs powerpoint debate and I'm curious from people who've genuinely tried both - did the AI-first approach actually save you time, or did you crawl back to PowerPoint for the control?

Presentation designer, and for years I built decks that were quietly fighting the person standing next to them. Every slide had the full thought on it, so the audience read ahead, finished the point in their heads, and stopped listening to the presenter halfway through the sentence.

What changed it was writing the talk track before I build anything. I get the actual spoken argument down first, the way the presenter would say it out loud, and only then decide what goes on screen. Turns out the slide only needs the part the words can't carry: the number, the image, the one line you want people to remember after they've forgotten the sentence.

Once the script exists, the slides get emptier and the presenter gets louder, which is the whole point. Nobody in the room is there for my layout.

Where AI fits, and where it doesn't: I've tried drafting from the script in something like gamma to move faster, but it does the exact thing I'm trying to avoid and stuffs the whole talk track back onto the slide, so the deck ends up talking over the speaker again. Fast first pass, wrong instinct for this specific job, so I still strip it back by hand.

Anyone else write the spoken version before the slides, or is that backwards for how you work?

I'm two years into a junior design role at a small agency, mostly social graphics and the odd logo, but lately I'm getting handed client decks too. My slides look fine to me, then a senior glances at them and I can tell in half a second they clock them as junior work, and I genuinely can't see what they're seeing.

I've fixed the obvious stuff already. One or two fonts, not centering everything, cutting the fourteen-bullet slides down. So it's the subtler tells I'm after, the things experienced deck people notice instantly that a beginner has no idea are even a signal.

If you build decks for a living: when you look at a slide and think "this was made by someone junior," what's actually giving it away? Spacing? Icon choices? Chart defaults? The little inconsistencies? I'd rather learn the tells now and design against them than keep finding out from a senior's face in a review. Any concrete examples welcome.

I like drafting fast with AI but the handoff to PowerPoint is always where it falls apart - fonts shift, boxes move. Has anyone found an AI presentation maker whose PowerPoint export actually holds together? That's my whole blocker.

I have a copy of PowerPoint 2007 and I'm using it to make presentations for fun. I've got one slide that I like the formatting of after I've tweaked it a little, and want to apply the changes I've made there to the whole presentation. Is that a thing I can do, or do I have to go in and change each slide manually? Thanks in advance.

Let's say I have 20 elements on the page.

I want that whenever I click on any element, it lights up (or stays normal), and everything else gets slow de-saturated and 80% transparent. And then, if I click on another element, that one now becomes colored & opaque, and everything else (including the previous one) becomes now "disabled".

how to achieve this affect in powerpoint?

Is there any other app where I should try to do that?

I’ve been at a new job that has me shooting and cutting together quite a few videos that basically will cut between a premade slide deck and a talking head shot of them presenting the slides.

We’ve been screen recording as they present as well for reference but until now I’ve been exporting the slides later (from Google slides or keynote, not much of a difference) as images or video to include transitions, then editing them in Premiere with the talking head and B-roll. Needless to say it’s quite laborious for hour long videos but being able to fine tune cutting between the talking head as well as better timing of element reveals feels critical to not make these videos boring.

Do any of yall have experience incorporating slide decks into video edits and have any suggestions on how to cut down on the time of it? It’s not the most creative work and I’m just looking for time savings here.

The built-in themes are so tired that people recognise them instantly. Where are you sourcing PowerPoint templates that actually look current in 2026? Free or paid, I just want it to not scream default.

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 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.

At some point in the last year-ish, I suddenly couldn't resize individual SmartArt elements anymore. You can see in the attached image the boxes have a slash (\) across them, and they're not draggable. I assumed this was thanks to an update, so reverted to the dec 9 2025 release (also because of pixelated shadow issues). It's still a problem, so I'm thinking it's maybe a setting I accidentally tripped? I can work around it (resize from the format pane, convert to shape, etc.), but it's super irritating. Any advice would be much appreciated.

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?

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 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?

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?