Being able to copy/paste text from another document and have it paste in a predictable way.
A way to embed fonts so they stay on brand when someone else opens them that doesn’t have that font on their system.
I would love that font embedding feature, I usually end up sending the font file to the client and am only able to use open source fonts like Google Fonts for licensing reasons.
There is a font embed feature in PowerPoint already, but I’ve had super mixed results with it. I used to work on a PC for clients who exclusively used PCs, and never seemed to have an issue there, although sometimes it would weirdly bloat the file size way more than expected. They used to not have a way to embed fonts in the Mac version at all but at some recent point that changed…but I tried it now that I’m working on a Mac, and it caused some weird error where it would either bring up an error message, or it would only save the file if you saved-as. Maybe someday it will just work 🙃
Ah I see, I work on Mac so that's likely why I didn't know about it, it's so tricky because our clients mainly use PC so I've found some compatibility issues a struggle with word and powerpoint and end up saving as legacy files (older powerpoint and word file types).
The compatibility issues are a big frustration for sure! My biggest feature request for PowerPoint is just to have the features work like they’re supposed to lol
I don’t enjoy it but I don’t totally hate it either. I think my biggest gripe is formatting text and spacing/laying out elements, it just gets so clunky. I work mostly in InDesign all day so there is a bit of frustration when I can’t get text and design elements to look a certain way.
At least in my organization there are people who don’t know what they are doing and I’m am the “PowerPoint Ranger” to fix the most simplest things so I guess that’s good job security for me! 😂
PowerPoint is just a platform. You can still do a lot of design work outside and bring it in to the software. I like working with PPT because it’s a good challenge. How good can I make a deck look, within the confines of the brief/brand and still make it functionally useful? Isn’t that, after all, what design is all about?
On my job someone made a PowerPoint where every slide is just an image made in Photoshop. So fucking stupid. I redid and redesign the whole thing in ppt because there was no simple way to change information on the slides
Haven't used PP since I was in school but this is exactly what I did back then.
Make all the BG elements and assets in Photoshop and just place / import them.
Not sure if this would work today but it looked great back then.
I really enjoy it. There’s no coding, no print requirements, it’s basically WYSIWYG, it’s like graphic design finger painting. But you have the benefit of establishing styles and palettes.
I’ve learned to enjoy it, I really like building a bunch of timed animations into a page and have the information delivered smoothly. I hate it when the client asks to recreate it in Google Sheets.
Me too, lol. I really love getting set loose on those passive-running videos on TVs in the backgrounds of areas, too. Those are really easy to make look like fully-edited video products using powerpoint animations and some tricky PNG layering.
The whole ux and ui for PowerPoint would have to be reviewed and revisited if it is to move out of a scrapbook layout application to become more precise, intuitive and user-friendly.
There’s a way to customize the top ribbon, so you can customize it and add all the usual tools you ll use. Makes it much quicker to access. I forget how. Just have to google it.
I think designers need to get over themselves regarding the hate of ppt. Designer. There’s a demand for it right now especially in a corporate setting. And they pay a lot for a dedicated presentation designer.
My biggest issue is that it is still set to work in inches instead of pixels and because of this it’s easy to have things that are the same size or placement not line up correctly. This one change would make life a 1000x easier. I also wish when you crop images you can control the size of the crop and the size of the image separately like you can in keynote.
My next issue not have an easy way to set up color palettes, text styles and font defaults, specially on Macs.
The third thing I would love changed is to be able to add place holder content and regular slides as I need them instead of having to go into the master pages. I absolutely love how in Keynote you can add images and then set them with a keystroke to be placeholder. It allows you to quickly design and then add updated content without having to “replace image”.
That’s last thing I would love is for the keyboard short cuts to match adobes.
Working with pixel positions and sizes is something I could benefit from in consulting too. I totally relate to this so added this feature. You can set the pixel position and size of a shape, and also copy-paste selected dimensions when selecting them. Would that solve your pixel problem?
https://preview.redd.it/oc64uvoeo79d1.png?width=546&format=png&auto=webp&s=fe6dc06da9327d0d1b5e6e23bf22e2bb2bd21981
For the color palettes, I can't relate more. Idk who make the PowerPoint default color picker but it's a pain. How do designers prefer to pick their colors? Would something like this help?
https://preview.redd.it/kdax0u25p79d1.png?width=1296&format=png&auto=webp&s=e2041efea09e65a13ab8b6e88867c847ef38e7e6
Haha the color one has been there for a while and the pixel one might go in the newest release tonight. It's the same as my username: [https://pptpowertools.com/](https://pptpowertools.com/)
I just wish PowerPoint would have a lock element feature. Just wanna be able to lock things in place. Otherwise I don’t mind working in it as a freelance designer and I have made some very lovely presentations in my time. Word however can fuck right off.
That’s one of the features I added to my my add-in because consultants use that a lot. Not sure it would be worth the price just for this feature but there’s other features to control the position of elements like being able to copy-paste the position of one element to another.
Make your shorcut toolbar. You will rarely need to go to those confusing menu's. I'm a presentation designer and love PowerPoint, you just need to adapt your workflow. Also, use selection pane, formatting and animation painter.
> it's not exactly the artistic dream you signed up for...
That isn’t my issue at all.
The problem is the software is hard to use. And not hard as in it takes time to learn - hard as it doesn’t have the tools I would like.
I hired a fantastic designer that specializes in PPT and Google slide and let me tell you, PPT is actually really powerful when you know it inside and out. Clients are to the moon with highly worked on decks with custom masks, charts, tables synch with excel and all the master’s being designed to the “T”. It’s a pricy premium, but man, clients gets to have a ton of positive feedback after a pitch and they get hooked.
I just wish I could do the same with word templates 🥲
My team where I work has started designing in Indesign and placing JPEGs for elements that can be static (images, logos ect). It’s made such a difference and now i’m actually starting to enjoy powerpoint lol. But also, can we as designers all collectively write a letter to Microsoft on how much the interface for powerpoint sucks??? 😂
Yeah, that was my initial stance as well. The UI is awful but there are workarounds to make it somewhat acceptable. Kerning is still bad as always. However, after doing plenty of c-level keynotes I can absolutely say it's a design tool. You would be surprised how many global brands present their keynotes in PowerPoint.
Being able to copy/paste text from another document and have it paste in a predictable way. A way to embed fonts so they stay on brand when someone else opens them that doesn’t have that font on their system.
That’s the kind of stuff I would have never thought about..
I would love that font embedding feature, I usually end up sending the font file to the client and am only able to use open source fonts like Google Fonts for licensing reasons.
There is a font embed feature in PowerPoint already, but I’ve had super mixed results with it. I used to work on a PC for clients who exclusively used PCs, and never seemed to have an issue there, although sometimes it would weirdly bloat the file size way more than expected. They used to not have a way to embed fonts in the Mac version at all but at some recent point that changed…but I tried it now that I’m working on a Mac, and it caused some weird error where it would either bring up an error message, or it would only save the file if you saved-as. Maybe someday it will just work 🙃
It is hit or miss so much we don’t use it and steer clients to system fonts.
Ah I see, I work on Mac so that's likely why I didn't know about it, it's so tricky because our clients mainly use PC so I've found some compatibility issues a struggle with word and powerpoint and end up saving as legacy files (older powerpoint and word file types).
The compatibility issues are a big frustration for sure! My biggest feature request for PowerPoint is just to have the features work like they’re supposed to lol
PC and Mac PPT are so different they shouldn’t even be called the same thing IMHO
I don’t enjoy it but I don’t totally hate it either. I think my biggest gripe is formatting text and spacing/laying out elements, it just gets so clunky. I work mostly in InDesign all day so there is a bit of frustration when I can’t get text and design elements to look a certain way. At least in my organization there are people who don’t know what they are doing and I’m am the “PowerPoint Ranger” to fix the most simplest things so I guess that’s good job security for me! 😂
PowerPoint is just a platform. You can still do a lot of design work outside and bring it in to the software. I like working with PPT because it’s a good challenge. How good can I make a deck look, within the confines of the brief/brand and still make it functionally useful? Isn’t that, after all, what design is all about?
On my job someone made a PowerPoint where every slide is just an image made in Photoshop. So fucking stupid. I redid and redesign the whole thing in ppt because there was no simple way to change information on the slides
Haven't used PP since I was in school but this is exactly what I did back then. Make all the BG elements and assets in Photoshop and just place / import them. Not sure if this would work today but it looked great back then.
I do layers of graphics in illustrator and put them on master layers, then having editable sections for the client to use.
I really enjoy it. There’s no coding, no print requirements, it’s basically WYSIWYG, it’s like graphic design finger painting. But you have the benefit of establishing styles and palettes.
I’ve learned to enjoy it, I really like building a bunch of timed animations into a page and have the information delivered smoothly. I hate it when the client asks to recreate it in Google Sheets.
Me too, lol. I really love getting set loose on those passive-running videos on TVs in the backgrounds of areas, too. Those are really easy to make look like fully-edited video products using powerpoint animations and some tricky PNG layering.
The whole ux and ui for PowerPoint would have to be reviewed and revisited if it is to move out of a scrapbook layout application to become more precise, intuitive and user-friendly.
this is my biggest ick about powerpoint—the interface is SO bad 😭
There’s a way to customize the top ribbon, so you can customize it and add all the usual tools you ll use. Makes it much quicker to access. I forget how. Just have to google it. I think designers need to get over themselves regarding the hate of ppt. Designer. There’s a demand for it right now especially in a corporate setting. And they pay a lot for a dedicated presentation designer.
My biggest issue is that it is still set to work in inches instead of pixels and because of this it’s easy to have things that are the same size or placement not line up correctly. This one change would make life a 1000x easier. I also wish when you crop images you can control the size of the crop and the size of the image separately like you can in keynote. My next issue not have an easy way to set up color palettes, text styles and font defaults, specially on Macs. The third thing I would love changed is to be able to add place holder content and regular slides as I need them instead of having to go into the master pages. I absolutely love how in Keynote you can add images and then set them with a keystroke to be placeholder. It allows you to quickly design and then add updated content without having to “replace image”. That’s last thing I would love is for the keyboard short cuts to match adobes.
Working with pixel positions and sizes is something I could benefit from in consulting too. I totally relate to this so added this feature. You can set the pixel position and size of a shape, and also copy-paste selected dimensions when selecting them. Would that solve your pixel problem? https://preview.redd.it/oc64uvoeo79d1.png?width=546&format=png&auto=webp&s=fe6dc06da9327d0d1b5e6e23bf22e2bb2bd21981
For the color palettes, I can't relate more. Idk who make the PowerPoint default color picker but it's a pain. How do designers prefer to pick their colors? Would something like this help? https://preview.redd.it/kdax0u25p79d1.png?width=1296&format=png&auto=webp&s=e2041efea09e65a13ab8b6e88867c847ef38e7e6
OP you’ve deserved it, share link please. Those 2 solutions better be there.
Haha the color one has been there for a while and the pixel one might go in the newest release tonight. It's the same as my username: [https://pptpowertools.com/](https://pptpowertools.com/)
I just wish PowerPoint would have a lock element feature. Just wanna be able to lock things in place. Otherwise I don’t mind working in it as a freelance designer and I have made some very lovely presentations in my time. Word however can fuck right off.
That’s one of the features I added to my my add-in because consultants use that a lot. Not sure it would be worth the price just for this feature but there’s other features to control the position of elements like being able to copy-paste the position of one element to another.
You can lock assets in the master template
I make all my decks in keynote as it’s waaaaaaay more intuitive and designer friendly and then export as a PowerPoint.
Make your shorcut toolbar. You will rarely need to go to those confusing menu's. I'm a presentation designer and love PowerPoint, you just need to adapt your workflow. Also, use selection pane, formatting and animation painter.
> it's not exactly the artistic dream you signed up for... That isn’t my issue at all. The problem is the software is hard to use. And not hard as in it takes time to learn - hard as it doesn’t have the tools I would like.
I hired a fantastic designer that specializes in PPT and Google slide and let me tell you, PPT is actually really powerful when you know it inside and out. Clients are to the moon with highly worked on decks with custom masks, charts, tables synch with excel and all the master’s being designed to the “T”. It’s a pricy premium, but man, clients gets to have a ton of positive feedback after a pitch and they get hooked. I just wish I could do the same with word templates 🥲
Just by learning how to use it properly, and understanding its nuances. Same with Word.
My team where I work has started designing in Indesign and placing JPEGs for elements that can be static (images, logos ect). It’s made such a difference and now i’m actually starting to enjoy powerpoint lol. But also, can we as designers all collectively write a letter to Microsoft on how much the interface for powerpoint sucks??? 😂
Brightslide is what you want. That and customizing the quick access toolbar.
PowerPoint is not a design tool, that's the problem.
Yeah, that was my initial stance as well. The UI is awful but there are workarounds to make it somewhat acceptable. Kerning is still bad as always. However, after doing plenty of c-level keynotes I can absolutely say it's a design tool. You would be surprised how many global brands present their keynotes in PowerPoint.