Some 'Need Of The Hour' Microsoft PowerPoint Upgrades We Need In 2022

All of us, at some point in our lives, have been dependent on Microsoft PowerPoint to build engaging presentations.

This platform has come a long way in redefining presentations and is making millions of lives easier.

However, with time every software needs the necessary updates that will elevate its efficiency rate and usability.

After working with several corporations, interacting with clients on a daily basis as well as working on live presentation projects, I observed and made mental notes whenever challenges hit.

Here is a culmination of all those experiences and learnings that have led me to believe that there are certain “need-of-the-hour” updates that Microsoft PowerPoint must incorporate:

• Save Each Slide Video Separately

PowerPoint doesn’t allow you to save individual slides manually. It means if you have 50 slides, you will have to deal with all of them in order to zero in on one. This can be a waste of time and affect the creative workflow of the presenter.

It’s high time Microsoft creates a built-in feature, thus eliminating the manual work of hiding slides manually and doing the renders again and again.

• Ability to set FPS in the export settings

Although PowerPoint lets us select the definition or the quality in which the file needs to be saved, there is no provision for setting the FPS rate available to the presenter.

It is extremely crucial for presenters to be able to manually determine this rate before they export a file. Choosing the FPS rate helps when you need to integrate the output of PowerPoint with other video production tools that are operating on a specific FPS value.

• Longer Animation Timeline than 1 Minute on a Specific Slide

In situations where the audio or animation effect can go beyond the set limit of one minute, the presenter has to go beyond their way to either crop the particular animation or compress it, making it look abrupt or incomplete. If PowerPoint incorporates a feature to extend this time limit beyond 1 minute, it would cut short the unnecessary hassles, resulting in superior quality animations.

• Option to change the slide corners to rounded corners

Microsoft PowerPoint leaves you with no other option but to have rectangular slides. Providing the presenter with an option to use slides with rounded corners for a more tablet-type experience for the presentations.

• Retiring old sound effects

It's time for PowerPoint to retire the old and monotonous sounds of swishes and splashes, and add in new-age AI or customisable sound effects, depicting presentations in an accurate way.

• Ability to star mark and tag slides with colours

Microsoft PowerPoint should provide a feature that will help presenters bookmark and categorise every slide with colours, category names, etc. This way, it will be easier to segregate the entire presentation, streamline the entire workflow

- Replacing content with Lorem Ipsum

To maintain confidentiality while outsourcing or delegating presentation making, PowerPoint should have a feature to convert original deck content into a lorem ipsum with one click, with an ability to reverse back to original once the file is exported.

• Preset sizes for different devices

Remember when you hit a new file in Illustrator, it gives you an option of various canvas sizes and that same experience can be replicated in PowerPoint too since today the PowerPoint is not only limited to Presentation design, its much more with a plethora of use cases like social media banners, certificates, letterheads, business cards, web banners, explainer videos and much more.

By implementing the above-mentioned tactics and upgrading their features, PowerPoint can retain a major chunk of consumers who have been making the “switch” to other efficient presentation-building tools.