Using AI Imagery In PowerPoint
Have you heard of Mid Journey? Mid Journey is just one of the many AI Image generators you can access online. You are able…
A decade of corporate PowerPoint training shows that high-impact presentations depend on story structure over software tricks, strict visual hierarchy, brand font management, and audience-first design. Success relies on eliminating slide text density and mastering essential productivity tools like the Quick Access Toolbar and Selection Pane.
Having spent ten years standing in front of corporate teams teaching presentation skills, one truth stands clear: software features change rapidly, but the fundamental mechanics of effective visual communication remain constant. Here’s what ten years and thousands of trainees have actually taught me.
I still get it, at least once a month, in a room full of otherwise sharp, capable professionals: someone tells me they’ve never used Ctrl+Z. Not once. They’ve been manually clicking Edit, then Undo, through their entire career.
It should stop surprising me by now. It doesn’t. Ten years in, the basics are still where most of the time is being lost, not in some advanced feature nobody’s heard of, but in the shortcuts sitting right there under everyone’s fingers.
I open almost every session with the same idea, because it’s the one people need to hear most: design for clarity, not clutter.
A slide’s job is to help your audience understand something, quickly. Most people build the opposite. They build a slide that proves how much they know, rather than one that helps someone else understand it. Those are not the same goal, and confusing the two is where most bad decks are born.
The number of hours lost to entirely avoidable problems still astonishes me. Templates that aren’t built properly, so nobody actually builds decks faster with them, they just fight the template instead.
And then there are the features almost nobody knows exist. The Quick Access Toolbar. The Selection Pane. Small things. Enormous time savers. I’d guess most people I train are losing hours a week to problems that a fifteen-minute conversation could have fixed years ago.
Every session, I teach my Four C Framework for planning and building a presentation properly, before a single slide gets touched.
And every single time, without fail, people are stunned by how simple it is. Not because it’s clever. Because it’s obvious, once someone’s shown it to you. What actually stuns me, after ten years, is that nobody arrives with a process of their own already in place. People will happily wing an entire client pitch, but wouldn’t dream of winging a spreadsheet.
Something has genuinely shifted in the last few years. More and more of the businesses I train in PowerPoint are coming back afterwards asking for presentation skills training too.
That tells me something. People are finally clocking that the deck was never the whole job. Being a good communicator matters more than it ever has, probably because a beautifully designed slide is no longer rare or impressive on its own. The bar for the delivery has gone up to match.
I show the Zoom feature near the end of most training days, and I can genuinely watch the room shift. You can see people doing the maths on every presentation they’ve ever delivered in a straight, rigid, slide-one-to-slide-forty line.
Conversational, non-linear presenting, jumping to what the room actually wants to talk about, rather than marching through a fixed order, is still a genuine novelty to most people. It shouldn’t be. It’s been possible for years. Most people just don’t know it’s there.
In 2026, people still want to email a PowerPoint file around, and I understand why, it’s fast and familiar. What surprises me is how few people know how to stop that file being 40MB and unwieldy.
Compressing images inside PowerPoint. Exporting as a PDF instead, smaller, and uneditable by whoever receives it. Simple fixes. Almost nobody’s been shown them, so a fancy, elaborate deck often isn’t actually what the room needs. Sometimes it’s just a file that isn’t a nightmare to send.
This is the one where I never have to convince anyone. I explain that the brain doesn’t retain information well in bullet-point form, and every room nods along. People already know this, somewhere. What they’ve never had is an alternative.
That’s usually the moment I show Convert to SmartArt, and it’s the one feature that reliably gets an actual round of applause. Not because it’s flashy. Because it solves a problem everyone already knew they had.
This one hasn’t shifted an inch in ten years. There’s an almost accepted culture of staying up until 3am the night before a big pitch, rebuilding slides that should have been finished a week earlier.
Every time-saving habit I teach is really just a quiet argument against that culture. Templates that work properly. Shortcuts that remove the fiddly bits. A process that starts before the panic does. None of it eliminates deadline pressure entirely. It gives people back the hours they didn’t know they were losing.
People ask me constantly whether AI is a threat to what I do. Honestly? Yes.
But I still meet someone new every month who doesn’t know Ctrl+Z exists. And that tells me exactly how far most businesses are from being AI-ready, whatever the headlines say. Copilot, Claude, every AI tool building into PowerPoint right now is getting genuinely good, fast. But handing someone a faster way to build the same bad deck they’ve always built isn’t going to win them more business. The gap was never really about the software. It’s about understanding what a good presentation actually needs to do.
That gap isn’t closing on its own. Which, if I’m honest, is exactly why I still have a job in ten years’ time. (Maybe!)
The biggest mistake is treating PowerPoint slides as a teleprompter or document. Overloading slides with full paragraphs and bullet points forces the audience to read ahead instead of listening to the presenter.
Teams can drastically speed up design by customizing the Quick Access Toolbar (QAT) with essential functions (like alignment and grouping) and maintaining a centralized library of approved master layouts.
If the receiving computer does not have your brand’s custom font file installed, PowerPoint automatically substitutes it with a system default font like Arial or Calibri. Embedding fonts via File > Options > Save > Embed Fonts prevents this issue.
