PowerPoint and Presenting Stuff

Working with Guides in PowerPoint 365 for Windows

Geetesh Bajaj — Wed, 30 Sep 2026 03:45:50 +0000

Let’s start with the basics: what are guides? Picture a tailor’s cutting table, marked with faint chalk lines that keep every cut straight and every seam aligned. Guides do the same job on a PowerPoint slide, except this time, you’re the tailor, and the chalk never runs out. Every guide can be moved, added, or deleted entirely on your terms. Nothing is fixed in place unless you decide it should be. But here’s the twist nobody warns you about: the moment guides show up on your slide, they stop being polite background lines and start quietly running the show. Snapping is built in, permanently switched on, no settings buried three menus deep. Let an object wander even a little too close, and it clicks into place before you’ve finished dragging, like a magnet that’s been lying in wait the whole time. You won’t aim. You won’t nudge pixel by pixel. The guide will simply decide you’re done.

Learn how to work with guides in PowerPoint 365 for Windows.

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PowerPoint and Presenting News: September 29, 2026

Geetesh Bajaj — Tue, 29 Sep 2026 04:30:47 +0000

This issue starts with a mystery. You add a guide in PowerPoint, and it won’t move. You didn’t lock it. You didn’t protect it. It just sits there. The hierarchical guide options tutorial solves that one. Then Paul Lukehart arrives with SimpleDim, a CAD add-in that gives PowerPoint the ability to measure real-world distances, which sounds impossible until you try it. Claudyne Wilder has a quieter provocation: your slides are fine, your data is solid, and your audience is still not connecting. A story fixes that faster than another bullet point ever will. And Jerry Weissman returns with Writer’s Block II, because apparently the first one wasn’t enough to unstick everyone.

Stay updated with the latest tutorials, tips, and news on PowerPoint and presentation techniques.

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Founder Journey: Conversation with Matteo Cassese

Geetesh Bajaj — Mon, 28 Sep 2026 04:00:50 +0000

Matteo Cassese is a business coach for entrepreneurs and keynote speaker with over twenty years of experience across corporate, startup, and creative worlds. He has worked with Warner Bros., Netflix, Sony, LinkedIn, and Vinted, and spoken on stages like SXSW and Gitex. During seven years at Warner Bros. Pictures, he helped launch more than 140 films. Based in Berlin, he helps founders and executives build businesses on their own terms.

In this conversation, Matteo speaks about his post, Founder’s Journey.

Geetesh: Matteo, you’ve moved from corporate storytelling to keynote speaking over the years. What shifted in how you show up in front of people along the way?

Matteo: Over the last few years I transitioned from trainer and facilitator to keynote speaker and coach. And I transitioned from hard skills to soft skills.

I moved from believing that the solution is learning something new, learning the craft, to seeing that the craft is just part of the solution. From believing that the solution is outside in (I come in as a trainer, teach you a technique, and then you are going to apply it flawlessly) to thinking that everyone is complete in every possible way, and that my job is to make you want to unearth your innate abilities. So the work is done from the inside out.

And after you have done the work from the inside out, obviously the technique will help. You need the hard skills, you need the craft, you need the repetitions. But if we have started from the inside, then whatever you do will have so much more power.

Geetesh: You’ve spoken about the difference between confidence and courage, saying confidence is something you decide rather than something you have. How does that idea show up for you when you’re about to walk on stage?

Matteo: In the five minutes before I go on stage I do a small meditation. I focus my thoughts on the audience, and on the gifts that I have for the audience. And then I focus on the idea of having fun together with the audience. I decide that what is going to happen is: we are going to have fun.

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Then I do my little run up the stage. Hopefully the stage is big enough. And lo and behold, that inner intention of having fun, and that confidence that we are going to have fun, is already in the room. The people are already smiling. I haven’t said a thing. I just enter the room with a certain energy.

It does take courage to step on stage. But it takes confidence to do that in a way that is intentional. The intention can also be: scare everybody, or be gloomy, or be boring. But that you embody that intention: that is confidence. And that is a decision.

Geetesh: In your Founder Journey post, you describe a “zero-confidence strategy,” where you invest your confidence in yourself rather than in whether a specific talk or video succeeds. Can you talk about how that plays out for you when a presentation doesn’t go the way you hoped?

Matteo: I am privileged that after a presentation I always have another presentation. After a talk, I always have another talk. After a video, I always have another video. So, if the presentation, the talk or the video bombs, it provides a learning opportunity for the next one. At the talk level, I want to have zero confidence. Zero, on purpose, because then I can allow the talk to fail. That is what I call the zero-confidence strategy. I can allow a video to fail miserably without becoming a failure.

However, there is an enormous amount of guilt and shame in failing, especially when you fail at the very human job of inspiring, entertaining, motivating and moving an audience in front of you. And most of the time it boils down to not being enough in the moment. Whenever you sense that something is off, that is where you should change your plan. Oftentimes speakers have their big narrative arc, and I myself, I find myself carried away: oh, they are going to get into it, they are going to understand it, I only need to get to that peak, I only need to get to that idea. And instead, the most excellent speakers realize in real time that the feedback is not good. They slow down. They stop. They involve the audience. They change their plans.

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The more I learn about the art of stagecraft, the more I realize that what you prepared is in the background, something you can go back to. What you are doing is something unique for the audience in front of you. Your senses are heightened, and if you feel that something is off, this is the moment for you to go off script.

In the broader sense, obviously you learn a lot from every failure, and you can bring that failure into your confidence. You say: okay, now I know that I shouldn’t do that, so I can be more confident the next time. You use experience as a proxy for confidence. But in reality, what a real keynote speaker is trying to do is to disappear. To disappear into the room and just be in the hearts and the minds of the people in the room. And to do that, you not only need a compelling story, but you also have to be in the moment.

Geetesh: Over the years you’ve gone from storytelling to myth-making. What does that look like when you’re preparing a talk or a message for an audience, and what is the difference between the two?

Matteo: Three years ago, I was on a plane coming back from a retreat. And I kept thinking: I have defined my career through storytelling, but what is bigger than storytelling? And it struck me that stories are usually parts, little fragments of something bigger, which is a myth.

You don’t have to think of Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey to think about myths. We live in a society of myths. AI right now is a myth. Cybersecurity is this mythological threat.

Apple as a whole is a mythology, right? Linux is the rising mythology of a way of tech that is free and open source. All the big movements have story points, but then they are part of a mythology.

Now, if I think of a talk simply in terms of story, what I want to do is take the audience somewhere. I want to bring them to another place, and by bringing them somewhere unfamiliar, I am going to change them. Then they go back to their day changed.

If I think of this as a myth maker, I am going to try and have them not go back to the world where they were living before but actually enter a new world from there. So I am going to have not just one story, but maybe ten stories, and these ten stories will represent a mythology. Let’s say these ten stories are ten products for Apple: the iPhone, the Mac, the HomePod, the Apple Watch and so on. You see how there are building blocks to a mythology. And then everything is under the same symbol, the bitten apple. Symbolism today is expressed by design. So we want a powerful brand that determines a design style, and this design style determines the look and feel and the vibe that everything has.

But ultimately, why do we design stuff? Because we want people to say: I’m a Mac, I’m a PC. That is the ultimate goal of myth making, for people to say: I subscribe, I belong to this myth. I wear Nike because I believe in performance, and I believe that with enough repetitions I will make it big.

So, whenever I am thinking about my little story, I am thinking: where does this keynote belong in the mythology that I am creating, in the brand that I am creating, in the product lineup that I am creating? And what sense of belonging is it giving to the ones who are going to listen to it?

Geetesh: Matteo, where can readers go from here?

Matteo: Three parting gifts. First, I have three premium courses free for everybody to take. Mindset, Pitch and Story. Second, if you want to follow me and get all my insights, subscribe to my YouTube channel. And third, if you don’t believe in the algorithm and want everything in your email, this is my newsletter.

The views and opinions expressed in this blog post or content are those of the authors or the interviewees and do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of any other agency, organization, employer, or company.

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Breaking Through Writer’s Block II

Geetesh Bajaj — Wed, 23 Sep 2026 04:00:38 +0000

By Jerry Weissman

The step-by-step process to get past the proverbial blank page of the previous blog is as applicable to presenters as it is to writers. Another method to break through the mental barricade is to just start talking.

Writers have long known that speaking aloud what they have written in silence helps them shape their ideas. In a Wired Magazine article on voice recognition, Clive Thompson tells of how sixteenth-century French essayist Michel de Montaigne and nineteenth-century American writer Henry James wrote by dictating their work to their secretaries. Thompson also cites the modern example of writer and critic Tim Carmody who found himself staring at an empty page, not knowing where to begin. He had no problem talking to friends about his ideas, so Carmody booted up Dragon (voice recognition software from Nuance), talked aloud for hours, and got past the block.

Carmody was experiencing the starting point of a spectrum of benefits that comes from speaking aloud the words they have written. Sometimes it helps with words that others have written. For instance, in researching content for my writing, I often find source material that exists only in print that I cannot copy and paste. In that case, I click on the Dictate function in Microsoft Word and convert the text into a document. During that process, I often find new ways to lead into or out of the passage.

Speaking aloud also provides perspective during the homestretch of the creative process—in the reviewing and polishing steps. Many professional writers read their work aloud as a form of proofreading.

Giving voice to what had been a silent process puts writers in the role of their readers and gives them an objective view of their content. Bestselling author Nicholson Baker calls his version of this process “speak-typing,” in which he dictates to himself and types as he speaks. In an interview with the New York Times about his book House of Holes, Baker explained that the words come out differently. The sentences come out simpler, and there’s less of a temptation to go back and add more foliage. I’m trying for a simpler kind of storytelling.

Speaking aloud is also useful when you are preparing your presentations. At Suasive, we call the process Verbalization. We recommend that presenters rehearse their presentations by displaying their slides in the slide sorter or storyboard view and then Verbalizing the run through of their narrative.

Giving voice to ideas also helps the challenging front end of the creative process. Just as Mr. Carmody did, you can jump-start your own creative process by speaking your presentation aloud and recording it using any voice recording function available to you. Then playback the recording and, based on what you hear, shape or reshape your ideas and words. The key to breaking the logjam is to start talking.

Writer’s block occurs because the prospect of starting from scratch is daunting. Even if a writer has a clear idea of a new story— or a presenter has a clear idea of a new presentation—the prospect of choosing which of all the many available ideas to include or how much detail to provide, overloads the mind. However, writers and presenters alike, having lived with their subject matter, know it intimately and have no difficulty chatting about it. Extend that facility into having a private chat with your recording device. You’ll find the process liberating and productive.

Just as Mr. Montaigne said: “The things I say,” Mr. Montaigne dictated, “are better than those I write.”

This blog is an excerpt from my book Winning Strategies for Power Presentations published by Pearson. Also, check out my newly released Presentation Trilogy—Presenting to Win, The Power Presenter, and In the Line of Fire—available on Amazon and other retailers.

Jerry Weissman is the founder and president of Suasive, Inc., formerly Power Presentations, Ltd. Jerry founded Suasive in 1988 and quickly established himself as the coach for Silicon Valley CEOs delivering critical presentations for their IPO roadshows. He taught them to tell their company stories through the eyes of their investors, and in so doing, significantly increased the valuations of their companies. He amassed an elite client list and soon widened his focus to helping public and privately held companies develop and deliver all types of business presentations.

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SimpleDim CAD Add-in for PowerPoint: Conversation with Paul Lukehart

Geetesh Bajaj — Tue, 22 Sep 2026 04:00:05 +0000

Paul Lukehart is founder and managing principal of PL Programs LLC, a project consulting firm founded in 2020. His background is in distribution and fulfillment operations, capital project management, and he has authored a book, Practical Floor Supervision on front-line operations leadership. Paul and his family live in Indiana, and in addition to slide decks for client needs, he works on projects like SimpleDim.

In this conversation, Paul discusses SimpleDim, an add-in that lets you work with CAD within PowerPoint.

Geetesh: Paul, tell us about your background and what led you to create SimpleDim. Why did you choose PowerPoint as the home for a CAD-style tool, instead of building something new from scratch?

Paul: My background after the US Army was working in distribution and fulfillment operations, first with Target Corporation, then Amazon, then XPO Logistics, then founding PL Programs LLC as an independent consultant. At XPO and as an independent consultant, my team and I managed projects. These projects include working with warehouse layouts, which are needed when purchasing automation or designing the operation.

One thing I noticed during design and concepting phases was that the engineers worked in CAD but everyone else used PowerPoint. PowerPoint is a universal document type; everyone can work in it, send it, and receive it. This is unlike CAD tools, for which only a small number of people know how to use and can have expensive licenses.

We’d often end up presenting operational concepts in PowerPoint with screenshots from plan PDFs or CAD drawings. And PowerPoint is right there in the meeting: While giving the presentations, we were often doing manual calculations of areas, distances, or cutting-and-pasting drawing bits to make to-scale representations of different ideas.

This was extremely painful! It felt to me that there had to be a better way, but I couldn’t find any PowerPoint tools to tell me distances. That led to building the first versions of SimpleDim (for Simple Dimensions), which was just a slide-scale and linear dimension tool. Thereafter, I added more comprehensive functionality and improvisations, based on customer feedback, and here we are!

Geetesh: How has SimpleDim helped users in the ways you expected? Have there been any surprising uses you didn’t originally plan for?

Paul: I’ve seen users in a wide variety of industries. While the original use case was in distribution and logistics, the tool has found a lot of different users.

We’ve seen logistics users yes, but also customers with government entities, fastener companies, property management, consultants of various types, private equity groups, lawyers, hobbyists, architects, manufacturers… the list goes on.

The most unexpected use case was an ocean ship captain with YWAM, an organization helping with health efforts in Papua New Guinea; he sent this feedback:

“We operate a non-profit and volunteer medical ship around the coast of Papua New Guinea.  Sometimes I also make PowerPoints of coastal areas from a navigational perspective.  If SimpleDim allowed measurements in nautical miles, that would be great.”

I didn’t anticipate SimpleDim would be working in coastal charts! But now it has nautical Miles included as a unit.

This diversity in users really speaks to a few things:

The Universality and Versatility of PowerPoint
The need to communicate real units and distances
Not everyone has or can use CAD

Geetesh: Can someone try SimpleDim before buying it? If so, what would you suggest they try first during the trial to get a real feel for what it can do?

Paul: Absolutely. I took a cue from some other great add-in vendors who allow free trials. Someone can try the full SimpleDim add-in for free for three days, with no credit card required (only an email address) from simpledim.com.

We’ve seen a lot of one-off users from the free trial. That’s fine; someone might just need it to lay out their living room. It’s fine. We want people to use it.

To get a feel for what it’s good for, a good universal trial might be to copy a screenshot of your living room floor plan into a slide. Measure a known distance and set the scale to that line distance. Pin the screenshot using the underlay tool. Then you can add shapes that are the relative size of your furniture, move them around, set dimensions from windows and find how much floor space you have available. This will get you used to scales, shapes, and other tools.

Of course, if you’re a professional user who does things with floor plans, do the same thing but with a facility or project you’re working on. I think you’ll like what it can do!

SimpleDim Feature Demo.
SimpleDim Feature Demo

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PowerPoint and Presenting News: September 15, 2026

Geetesh Bajaj — Tue, 15 Sep 2026 04:30:22 +0000

Looking prepared is not the same as being prepared. That gap is what this issue explores. ScriptAssist closes it on camera, giving presenters a way to read their script while holding eye contact, so the audience sees confidence rather than effort. The executive presence article from Suasive argues that this kind of perceived confidence is learnable and that it shapes career outcomes more than most people expect. Our pre-conference conversations with John Polk, Lori Chollar, and Troy Chollar ahead of Presentation Summit 2026 bring the same idea into the room, where how you stand, speak, and connect with an audience often decides whether the message lands.

Stay updated with the latest tutorials, tips, and news on PowerPoint and presentation techniques

The post PowerPoint and Presenting News: September 15, 2026 appeared first on PowerPoint and Presenting Stuff.

Hierarchical Guide Options in PowerPoint 365 for Windows

Geetesh Bajaj — Mon, 14 Sep 2026 03:45:07 +0000

Marcus thought he’d cracked the code. First, he learned to enable guides. Then, he discovered the right-click menu, and now is adding, coloring, and deleting guides like a pro. Then a colleague mentioned something called guide hierarchy, and Marcus froze. Hierarchy? He thought guides were just… lines. Marcus was happy to learn more. Turns out, guides in PowerPoint have layers, a bit like a family tree. There are guides that belong to the whole family (the Slide Master), guides that belong to individual branches (Slide Layouts), and guides that belong to just one person (your actual slides).

Learn about hierarchical guide options in PowerPoint 365 for Windows.

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PowerPoint and Presenting News: September 8, 2026

Geetesh Bajaj — Tue, 08 Sep 2026 04:30:54 +0000

Credibility is the thread running through this issue. INSYNCR, as Kurt Dupont explains, exists because a generated figure looks right but a bound figure is right, and the distinction is what boardrooms and client reports depend on. Laszlo Diewald’s presentaid Charts interview makes a similar point: annotations that move with the data, charts that open correctly for anyone, and numbers that don’t drift between tools. Then there is Presentation Summit 2026, September 13 to 16, where our conversations with Camille Holden, Chantal Bosse, Ilene Bergelson, and Sally Zimney remind us that credibility is just as fragile in the room as it is in the spreadsheet behind the slide.

Stay updated with the latest tutorials, tips, and news on PowerPoint and presentation techniques

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Presentation Summit 2026: Conversation with Troy Chollar

Geetesh Bajaj — Tue, 08 Sep 2026 04:15:20 +0000

Troy Chollar is co-founder and a Sr. Designer of TLC Creative Services and awarded by Microsoft as an MVP for PowerPoint for 24 consecutive years. For more than two decades, Troy has helped organizations create presentations ranging from executive briefings and sales decks to large-scale live event experiences. A regular presenter at The Presentation Summit (he was an attendee at the very first conference!), host of The Presentation Podcast, and the voice of ThePowerPointBlog, Troy is passionate about sharing practical PowerPoint techniques, animation strategies, and workflow improvements that presentation professionals can immediately apply to their own projects.

In this conversation, Troy talks about the upcoming Presentation Summit 2026, being held virtually from September 13 to 16, 2026.

Indezine.com is the official media partner for the Presentation Summit.

Geetesh: Troy, you’re delivering two sessions this year, Design Faster! and PowerPoint Animation for Grown-Ups. Design Faster! combines a Stream Deck, add-ins, and QAT tricks into one workflow. What led you to bring these three specific tools together rather than treating them separately?

Troy: I will focus on the Design Faster! session because that’s where I’ll be diving into my real-world use of a Stream Deck, PowerPoint add-ins, and customized Quick Access Toolbar. While these are all tools, the common thread isn’t the tools themselves, it’s the workflows they enable. This session is about how to setup a workflow that makes presentation design faster – using some amazing tools!

Over the years at TLC Creative Services, I’ve realized that most presentation designers lose far more time to small interruptions than to big challenges. We spend our days repeating hundreds of little actions: formatting objects, aligning content, switching between commands, and navigating menus. Each action is generally relatively minor, but without an efficient workflow those moments add up to an amazing amount of wasted time every day.

The Stream Deck, PowerPoint add-ins, and the Quick Access Toolbar each solve different parts of that workflow problem. Individually, they’re useful tools. Combined, we can create a design workflow that is noticeably faster, more consistent, and enables us to create design and layouts.

My goal is not to convince attendees they need specific tools. It’s to show how thinking intentionally about your design workflow can eliminate friction, streamline the repetitive work, and let you spend more time designing with less time clicking.

Geetesh: PowerPoint Animation for Grown-Ups looks at advanced animation to improve clarity, not just add polish. Where do you draw the line between animation that helps communication and animation that gets in its way?

Troy: The line for me is whether the motion is helping the audience know where to look and what to understand.

For me, presentation animation is any onscreen motion the audience sees. That includes effects from the animation pane, slide transitions, video, and even unintended movement when elements jump between slides (I hate seeing that!). The rule is, motion automatically attracts attention – so every movement needs a reason.

Everyone hears me talk about animation and showcase cool things. But animation in a presentation is not always good. It starts getting in the way when it becomes inconsistent or creates what I call “animation noise.” If the audience is focused on anticipating the next effect instead of listening to the presenter, the animation is working against the message.

Conversely, good animation establishes a consistent rhythm and controls the flow of information. It can reveal a process, bring focus to a specific item as the presenter is discussing it, and guide the audience through dense content.

My basic test is: Should this animate at all? If the motion supports the content and the presenter, it belongs. If the audience notices the effect more than the message, it probably does not.

Of course, this is still a Presentation Summit session, so we’ll talk about animation philosophy, but we’ll spend even more time showcasing some amazing PowerPoint techniques and examples that everyone can apply to their own presentations!

Geetesh: Your studio has spent years pushing PowerPoint into live event territory, large screens, synchronized multi-screen setups, that kind of scale. Has any of that “big stage” thinking made its way into how you approach a single laptop presentation?

Troy Absolutely. Working on large-scale events forces you to become very intentional about the audience experience. When you’re creating content for an amazing 200-foot-wide LED wall in a general session, every element has to earn its place. The slide design needs to work in the environment and have purpose and precision. Those aren’t optional because audiences immediately notice awkward design or content that is not literally pixel perfect.

That mindset transfers directly to a laptop presentation, an advisor board meeting, or breakout room with a 50-, 65-, or 80-inch display.

The same principles need to apply: establish a clear visual hierarchy, guide attention deliberately, remove distractions with objects aligned and distributed perfect on each slide and across slides. The slides should support the speaker, not compete with them.

Large-event work is also thinking in terms of moments rather than slides. Audiences don’t remember slide 37. They remember the moment they understood a concept, saw something unexpected, or connected with an idea. That’s true at a giant event with amazing staging and really-really big screens, and it’s just as true single-screen meeting or a laptop presentation.

The technology and scale may change, but good presentation design is still about helping presenters communicate clearly and helping the audience remember what matters.

What is the Presentation Summit?

For over two decades, Rick Altman has been hosting the Presentation Summit, a highly popular event that is geared towards users of PowerPoint and other presentation platforms.

Indezine.com is the official media partner for the Presentation Summit.

Virtual: September 13 to 16, 2026

The post Presentation Summit 2026: Conversation with Troy Chollar appeared first on PowerPoint and Presenting Stuff.

Presentation Summit 2026: Conversation with Lori Chollar

Geetesh Bajaj — Mon, 07 Sep 2026 04:15:20 +0000

Lori Chollar is co-founder and CEO of TLC Creative Services, Inc., a design studio that thrives in the presentation world, and the live and virtual event industry. Her diverse design background spans traditional graphic and print design, apparel and product design, and a whole lot of presentation, template, and multimedia design. Building from a formal degree in graphic design to a thriving freelance business, her company with husband Troy has grown into a successful corporate design studio. Lori is passionate about good design and good business.

In this conversation, Lori talks about the upcoming Presentation Summit 2026, being held virtually from September 13 to 16, 2026.

Indezine.com is the official media partner for the Presentation Summit.

Geetesh: Lori, your session this year is Put Your Deck on a Diet, about shrinking bloated files into fast, manageable presentations. Is file bloat mostly a design discipline problem, or does PowerPoint itself need to do more to prevent it?

Lori: I think the answer is a little bit of both, but if I had to choose one, I’d say it’s usually a workflow and design discipline problem.

PowerPoint is actually very forgiving, sometimes a little too forgiving. It will happily accept a 25MB image that’s only being displayed as a small thumbnail on a slide. It’ll let you import videos, create duplicate slide masters, embed fonts, keep dozens of hidden slides, and generally continue adding content without warning you that performance may start to suffer.

That being said, PowerPoint gives us a lot of tools to help manage file size and performance. And while we use those tools, to effectively optimize a file we also use a variety of add-ins and other software applications.

At TLC Creative, we work with presentations that are often used in high-stakes environments such as sales meetings, product launches, investor events, and large general sessions. In those situations, file size isn’t really a storage problem, it’s a performance problem. A sluggish deck can affect editing, collaboration, rehearsal, and even presenter confidence.

One of the main points of my session is that the easiest presentation to optimize is the one that’s built correctly from the beginning. A few good habits can prevent many of the issues people encounter later. The challenge is that many people don’t think about optimization until a file becomes painful to use. By then, they’re reacting to a problem instead of preventing one.

Geetesh: You’ve been a regular voice at the Presentation Summit for several years now. With so many more tools now competing for attention in the presentation space, has the audience’s relationship with PowerPoint itself changed, or does it still hold its ground?

Lori: There are certainly more tools available today than there were when I first started attending and speaking at the Summit. New design platforms, AI-powered tools, collaborative workspaces, video-based communication tools, and countless other presentation-related technologies have all entered the conversation.

What’s interesting, though, is that PowerPoint continues to hold an incredibly important place in the business world.

One reason for this is flexibility. PowerPoint isn’t just a presentation tool. It’s become a communication platform. Organizations use it for presentations, sales materials, internal communications, event graphics, training materials, executive briefings, and much more. It’s difficult to find another tool that can comfortably serve all of those purposes while remaining intuitive and easy to learn.

I think what’s changed most is not PowerPoint’s relevance, but our expectations. Audiences expect more. Presenters expect more. And of course, our presentation clients certainly expect more. The quality of visual communication continues to rise, and tools like AI are helping people work faster and explore ideas more quickly.

At the same time, some things haven’t changed. Strong content and storytelling, thoughtful design, and clear communication are still what make presentations effective. The software is important, but it’s not what ultimately makes a presentation memorable.

PowerPoint remains one of the most versatile canvases available, and I don’t see that changing anytime soon.

Geetesh: If a presenter wants the biggest improvement in their work for the least amount of effort, what’s the one thing you’d tell them to focus on?

Lori: I would tell them to focus on clarity.

Not animations. Not fancy transitions. Not the latest design trend.

Clarity.

Whenever we’re designing presentations, we’re constantly asking ourselves a simple question: “What is the audience supposed to understand from this slide?”

If that answer isn’t immediately clear, the slide usually needs more work.

Some of the biggest improvements we make is simply simplifying content, reducing visual clutter, creating better hierarchy, and giving important information room to breathe. These aren’t necessarily complicated design skills. They’re often small decisions that make a very big difference.

Interestingly, clarity also connects back to the subject of my session. Just as cluttered slides can make information harder to understand, cluttered PowerPoint files can make presentations harder to build, edit, and deliver. In both cases, removing what’s unnecessary allows the important things to simply work better.

Good presentations aren’t about adding more. Very often, they’re about knowing what to take away.

What is the Presentation Summit?

For over two decades, Rick Altman has been hosting the Presentation Summit, a highly popular event that is geared towards users of PowerPoint and other presentation platforms.

Indezine.com is the official media partner for the Presentation Summit.

Virtual: September 13 to 16, 2026

The post Presentation Summit 2026: Conversation with Lori Chollar appeared first on PowerPoint and Presenting Stuff.