Thoughts and impressions of happenings in the world of PowerPoint and presentations, continuously updated since 2003.
See Also:
PowerPoint and Presenting Notes
PowerPoint and Presenting Glossary
Have you watched an expert tailor at work? They start by marking the pattern on the fabric. They don’t just slap down one chalk mark on the fabric and call it a day. There’s one chalk mark for the hem, another for the waist, and yet another for the sleeve length. Every single mark earns its place on that fabric. PowerPoint hands you the design equivalent of that very first chalk mark: one horizontal guide, one vertical guide, crossing politely at dead center of your slide. That works well for simple layouts, but more complex designs call for a more complete guide structure. Just like the tailor who can add chalk marks as needed, you can add more guides to create a proper visual structure for your slides.
Learn how to add more guides in PowerPoint 365 for Windows.
Filed Under:
PowerPoint 365
Tagged as: Guides, Interface, Microsoft 365, Microsoft Windows, Office 365, PowerPoint 365, Tutorials

Ramgopal M. S. is the founder of Presentation Process and author of Clear Slides. Over the past 20 years, he has helped millions of professionals communicate complex ideas through clear, engaging presentations. His YouTube channel has over 560,000 subscribers, where he shares practical PowerPoint and presentation design techniques.
In this conversation, Ramgopal discusses the Presentation Process AI Club initiative.
Filed Under:
Interviews
Tagged as: AI, Interviews, Presentation Process, Ramgopal M. S., Training
Gavin McMahon is a founder and Chief Content Officer for fassforward consulting group. He leads the design and product development of fassforward’s services. This crosses diverse topics, including Leadership, culture, decision-making, information design, storytelling, and learning design.
In this interview, Gavin talks about his new book, Story Business.
Filed Under:
Interviews
Tagged as: Books, Gavin McMahon, Interviews, Stories
Every presentation problem has a root cause. Most of the time, it’s structure. Jerry Weissman’s piece on writer’s block makes the case for starting with your goal, not your slides. The note on converting text boxes to placeholders tackles a structural problem that quietly undermines thousands of decks. And Peter Claus Lamprecht’s PPTX Toolkit interview goes deeper still, into the XML layer that governs how placeholders behave when layouts change. Three topics at different levels of depth, all pointing to the same truth: get the structure right first, and everything else follows.
Stay updated with the latest tutorials, tips, and news on PowerPoint and presentation techniques
Filed Under:
Ezine
Tagged as: Ezine, Indezine, News, PowerPoint
Peter Claus Lamprecht is a presentation consultant based in Hamburg, Germany, with more than 37 years of experience. He helps self-employed professionals, sales and marketing teams, executives and consultants develop presentations that persuade and deliver results—from storyline to slide design to delivery. His specialty is PowerPoint slide masters, that work flawlessly on a technical level, implement the given design precisely and thus save time when working in PowerPoint. With the PPTX Toolkit, he is currently building a tool for direct access to the XML structure of PowerPoint files.
In this conversation, Peter talks about PPTX Toolkit.
Filed Under:
Interviews
Tagged as: Add-in, Interviews, Peter Claus Lamprecht, PPTX Toolkit, Templates, XML
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