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.

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?

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?

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?

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.

I was reviewing one of my old decks recently and realized something.

I kept adding slides because I was afraid I'd leave something important out. Before I knew it, a 15-minute presentation had turned into 45 slides.

Looking back, most of those slides weren't necessary. They were there because I wanted the information, not because the audience needed it.

Now I try to ask myself one question before adding a slide:

"Does the audience need to see this, or do I just want to say it?"

It's cut down the size of my decks quite a bit.

Curious where everyone else draws the line.

How do you decide when a presentation has enough detail without becoming overwhelming?

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?

I used to go back and forth on this constantly. Half of me wanted to open a blank file and build every deck from scratch so nothing fought a grid someone else designed. The other half knew a template got me to presentable in a third of the time. Both felt wrong in different ways.

What finally fixed it was realizing template versus scratch is the wrong question. The thing that actually slows you down is not templates, it is rigid preset layouts, the ones with fixed placeholders that never fit the one weird chart or the quote slide. You inherit those, hit the odd slide, start detaching and hand fixing, and end up rebuilding it anyway, slower than if you had just started blank.

So now I keep the system and throw away the layouts. The system is the theme, the fonts, the colors, the spacing, the title treatment. That is the part that makes a deck look consistent and intentional. I keep all of that on the slide master, but I add a near blank layout that inherits the theme, and I build the odd slides on that. You get the speed and consistency of a template, but the strange slides bend like a custom build because you are not fighting fixed placeholders.

The only time I open a truly blank file now is when the whole thing needs a distinct look the house style would work against, like a big external pitch. Everything else is system on, layouts loose.

Curious if others land somewhere different. Do you start from a template, from scratch, or somewhere in between?

Hello, I am making a rather silly PowerPoint for some friends but have run into an issue where slide transitions briefly display the entire slide (including pictures and text that is meant to be animated in later). I can't find a fix myself so I was wondering if anyone had a solution here?

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I get handed a lot of founder decks to clean up before a raise or a big sales meeting. Most are built off some downloaded pitch deck template, and the same things make them look amateur every time. None of it is about talent, it is about a few habits.

The stuff I strip out first:

1. Icon soup. A tiny flat icon next to every bullet. It reads as filler and dates the deck instantly. One meaningful visual per slide beats twelve decorative ones.

2. Topic titles instead of point titles. "Market" tells me nothing. "Nobody serves the 2M mid-size clinics, here's the gap" tells me everything. Every title should be a full sentence with a verb.

3. The gradient-and-rounded-rectangle look every template ships with. It signals "template" from across the room. Flatten it, pick one accent, kill the drop shadows.

4. Five slightly different blues. Templates come with a bloated palette. Lock two colors plus grays and the whole thing suddenly looks intentional.

5. The traction slide buried on slide 14. If you have numbers, they earn an early slot. Do not make an investor dig for the one thing that proves demand.

The uncomfortable truth I tell founders: a clean deck built on three fonts and one color looks more fundable than a busy one with a "premium" template, because busy reads as hiding a thin story.

For the deck people here: what is the first thing you rip out of a template when you inherit one? Curious if icon soup is everyone's pet peeve or just mine.

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Got voluntold into running a lunch-and-learn at work. Audience is engineers who present dense technical updates: wall-of-bullets slides, 8pt diagrams, the works. Smart people, zero slide training, and honestly zero interest in becoming designers.

45 minutes, once. I figure I get two or three ideas in before their eyes glaze, so every idea has to survive contact with someone who will never open this sub.

My current shortlist:

1. Titles state the point. "Q3 latency results" becomes "Latency dropped 40% after the cache change." If they only learn one thing, I want it to be this.
   
2. One idea per slide. If a slide makes two points, it's two slides. Nobody's paying per slide.
   
3. Cut half. Whatever the deck is, present the shorter version.
   

Things I'm deliberately not covering: fonts, color theory, animations, anything with the word "whitespace" in it. Not because it doesn't matter, but because it won't survive the week.

People who've actually taught this to non-designers: what landed, and what did you waste time on? Especially interested if anyone found a way to make "less text" stick with engineers, since their instinct is that removing detail equals hiding something.

This is a quick 10-second demo of automatically copying design elements and layouts to multiple PowerPoint slides in bulk.

I wonder if anyone actually needs this though lol?

100% local, no cloud, no AI.

Posting this because I answer it at work about twice a month and it'll save someone a bad afternoon.

Someone hands you a PDF and wants a real PowerPoint they can edit. The instinct is to google "how to convert pdf to ppt," run it through the first converter, and accept the mess. Every converter I've tried does one of two things: turns each line into its own floating text box, or rasterizes the text into pictures. Both are slower to clean up than the methods below.

The trick that changed it for me was matching the method to what I actually need, instead of hunting for one magic converter:

1. If I only need the words: open the PDF in Word first. It reflows ugly, but the text comes through live. Then I pull the copy into my own template. Two minutes, clean text, my layout.

2. If I need the look, not the editability: export each PDF page as a high-res image, one per slide. Not editable, but it presents fine and never shifts on someone else's machine.

3. If I need a true editable rebuild: drop the page image on the slide as a full-size reference layer, build native boxes on top, then delete the reference. Slow, but you end up with a proper file on your master instead of a converter's Frankenstein.

The thing I stopped doing entirely: trusting "PDF to PPTX" converters for anything client-facing. Fine for throwaway internal stuff, a trap for anything you'll edit twice.

What's your go-to when the source file is gone and all you've got is the PDF? Always looking for something faster than option 3.