PowerPoint for Microsoft 365 cheat sheet

Need to create and share a presentation? If so, you probably turn to the most popular presentation application in the world, Microsoft PowerPoint for Windows.

Microsoft sells Office under two models: Individuals and businesses can pay for the software license up front and own it forever (what the company calls the “perpetual” version of the suite), or they can purchase a Microsoft 365 subscription, which means they have access to the software for only as long as they keep paying the subscription fee.

When you purchase a perpetual version of the suite — say, Office 2021 or Office 2024 — its applications will never get new features, whereas Microsoft 365 subscriptions are continually updated with new features. For more details, see  our in-depth comparison of the two Office models.

This cheat sheet gets you up to speed on the major features that have been introduced or changed in the Windows desktop client for PowerPoint in Microsoft 365 over the past few years. We’ll periodically update this story as new features roll out. (If you’re using the perpetual-license PowerPoint 2021 or 2024, see our separate Office 2021 and 2024 cheat sheet.)

In this guide:

Use the Ribbon

Search to accomplish tasks quickly

Tap Designer for slide design ideas

Add new types of charts

Morph from one slide to the next

Use the Zoom feature to present nonsequentially

Collaborate in real time

Use Microsoft 365 Copilot in PowerPoint

Use AutoSave as a safety net while you work

Review or restore earlier versions of a presentation

Other useful PowerPoint for Microsoft 365 features

Use keyboard shortcuts

Use the Ribbon

The Ribbon interface, which puts commonly used commands in a tabbed toolbar running across the top of the application window, is alive and well in the current version of PowerPoint. Microsoft has tweaked the Ribbon’s looks numerous times over the years, but it still works the same way it always has: just click one of the Ribbon’s tabs to see related commands on the toolbar. For example, click Insert to find buttons for inserting tables, pictures, charts, icons, and more.

The Ribbon makes it easy to access key commands with a few clicks.
Preston Gralla / Foundry

As in previous versions of PowerPoint, if you want the Ribbon commands to go away, press Ctrl-F1. (Note that the tabs above the Ribbon — File, Home, Insert, and so on — stay visible.) To make them appear again, press Ctrl-F1. You can also make the commands on the Ribbon go away by clicking the name of the tab you’re currently on. To make the commands reappear, click any tab.

You’ve got other options for displaying the Ribbon as well. To get to them, click the Ribbon display options icon (a down arrow) at the bottom right of the Ribbon. A dropdown menu appears with these four options:

Full-screen mode: This maximizes the content portion of PowerPoint, which now takes up the entire screen, eliminating the entire Ribbon as well as the Quick Access toolbar. To show the Ribbon again, click at the top of PowerPoint or click the three-dot icon at the upper right of the screen.

Show tabs only: This shows the tabs but hides the commands underneath them. It’s the same as pressing Ctrl-F1. To display the commands underneath the tabs when they’re hidden, press Ctrl-F1 or click a tab.

Always show Ribbon: Selecting this shows both the tabs and the commands.

Hide/Show Quick Access toolbar: This hides or shows the Quick Access toolbar, which gives you fast access to PowerPoint features you want to have always available, such as New, Undo, Repeat, and so on.

To customize the toolbar, click the small down arrow at its right (and before the presentation’s file name), and from the dropdown menu that appears, choose which commands to put on it. If you don’t see a command you want, click More Commands, find the command you want on the left, and click Add.

You can have the toolbar appear either at the top of the screen, just to the right of the AutoSave button, or instead just underneath the Ribbon. To move it from one place to another, click the down arrow to the right of the toolbar, and from the menu that appears, select either Show below the Ribbon or Show above the Ribbon.

Microsoft has for many years teased a simplified version of the Ribbon that hides most of the commands to reduce clutter. That simplified Ribbon is available in the PowerPoint web app, but there’s currently no sign that it will appear in the PowerPoint desktop app.

When you click the File tab on the Ribbon, you get sent to a useful area that Microsoft calls backstage. If you click Open, Save a Copy, or Save As from the menu on the left, you can see the cloud-based services you’ve connected to your Office account, such as SharePoint and OneDrive. Each location now displays its associated email address underneath it. This is quite helpful if you use a cloud service with more than one account, such as if you have one OneDrive account for personal use and another one for business. You’ll be able to see at a glance which is which.

The backstage area shows which cloud-based services you’ve connected to your Office account and lets you connect to additional ones.Preston Gralla / Foundry

You can also easily add new cloud-based services. From the screen that shows you your online locations, click Add a Place and choose which service to add. Note, though, that you’re limited to SharePoint and OneDrive.

Use the Search bar to accomplish tasks quickly

PowerPoint is so chock-full of powerful features that it can be tough to remember where to find them all. Microsoft 365 has made it easier via the Search bar, which can put even buried tools or those you rarely use in easy reach.

To use it, click in the Search bar — it’s above the Ribbon in the title area. (Keyboard fans can instead press Alt-Q to go to the Search box.) Type in a task you want to do, such as change handout orientation. You’ll get a menu showing potential matches for the task.

In this instance, the top result is a Handout Orientation listing that when clicked gives you two options — one to set the orientation to Portrait (vertical) and the other to Landscape (horizontal). Just click the one you want to use. If you’d like more information about your task, the last items that appear in the menu let you select from related Help topics or display additional search results.

The Search bar gives advice on changing the handout orientation (or any other task you query).
Preston Gralla / Foundry

Even if you consider yourself a PowerPoint pro, give Search a try. It’ll save you lots of time and is much more efficient than hunting through the Ribbon to find a command. It also remembers the features you’ve previously clicked on in the box, so when you click in it, you first see a list of previous tasks you’ve searched for. That makes sure that tasks that you frequently perform are always within easy reach, while at the same time making tasks you rarely do easily accessible.

Search is gaining more capabilities, too. Some users of Microsoft 365 enterprise and education editions can use the Search box to find people in their organization, SharePoint resources, and other personalized results from within PowerPoint. (These features are being rolled out in stages, so you might not have them yet.)

Tap Designer for slide design ideas

PowerPoint’s Designer feature makes it easy to quickly create high-quality slides without doing much work. When you create a new slide or insert an image into a slide, the Designer panel opens on the right side of the screen, offering you a choice of multiple layouts for the slide. Choose the layout you want and take it from there.

When you insert an image into a slide or create a new slide, the Designer panel offers suggestions for the best layouts to use.
Preston Gralla / Foundry

Microsoft claims the feature was built with the help of graphic designers and, if you’re inserting an image, takes into account the content of the image. A Microsoft blog post about Designer claims that “if the visual contains a natural scene, Designer can zoom, crop and frame it. But if the image contains a chart, it focuses in on the relevant region to ensure the important data is highlighted.”

To make sure your version of PowerPoint has enabled Designer, click File > Options, and at the bottom of the screen in the PowerPoint Designer section, click the box next to Automatically show me design ideas, then click OK.

Add new types of charts

Over the last decade, Microsoft has added several new types of charts you can add to PowerPoint presentations (as well as Excel spreadsheets and Word documents): Treemap, Sunburst, Waterfall, Histogram, Pareto, Box & Whisker, Funnel, and Map charts. Each provides a unique way to display data visually. See our Excel for Microsoft 365 cheat sheet for details about the new chart types, including what each one looks like and what type of data it’s best suited for.

To insert any chart in a presentation, select Insert > Chart from the Ribbon or click the chart icon in the area that appears when you create a new slide — it’s in the box that also lets you add text, tables, graphics, and other content. Either way, you’ll be shown the full gallery of charts you can insert.

Make a selection and click OK, and it appears in your document with placeholder data. At the same time, a pop-up window appears that looks like a mini Excel spreadsheet. Enter or edit the data, or else click the Edit in Excel button to open it up in Excel and edit it there.

When you insert a chart, a window where you can edit the data pops up.
Preston Gralla / Foundry

Note that the Pareto chart does not show up in the main list of chart types. To insert one, you’ll have to first select Histogram from the list of chart types, and at the top of the screen that appears, select the option to the right, Pareto.

Morph from one slide to the next

This feature lets you show motion in transitions and inside slides, but without having to use the Animations tab. To use it, duplicate an existing slide: Select the slide, then, on the Home tab, click the down arrow next to New Slide and select Duplicate Selected Slides.

Then make changes to that duplicate, such as shrinking an element or elements in it, making them bigger, moving them to new locations, and/or rotating them. Now select Morph from the Transitions tab, and PowerPoint automatically creates an animated transition between the slides. Onscreen, they look like a single slide morphing.

Use the Zoom feature to present nonsequentially

Ever wish you could jump around in your presentation, showing your slides in nonsequential order? The Zoom feature does this by creating a kind of visual shortcuts table that lets you quickly zoom from one section to another — handy in case you want to go back to a previous slide or skip over a section of your presentation.

When you’re in a presentation, select Insert > Zoom. You get a choice of three different kinds of Zoom:

Summary Zoom: This lets you create a visual summary of your presentation. You select the slides you want included in the summary. Each of those slides becomes the beginning of a section of the presentation. When you’re giving a presentation, you can click a thumbnail on the Summary Zoom slide to go to the beginning slide of a section.

Section Zoom: If you’ve already created sections in your presentation, when you choose Section Zoom, you’ll see those sections. Choose which you want to put on your Section Zoom slide. Then when you’re giving a presentation, click any thumbnail to jump to that section.

Slide Zoom: This lets you jump from a slide to any other slide in the presentation. It’s generally used for short presentations without many sections. After you click Slide Zoom, you select which slides you want to be able to jump to, and they’ll show up in a Slide Zoom slide. Click any slide to jump to it.

Here’s how to insert a Summary Zoom slide, with thumbnails of your entire presentation.
Preston Gralla / Foundry

Collaborate in real time

PowerPoint and other Microsoft 365 apps include a real-time collaboration capability that lets people work on presentations together from anywhere in the world with an internet connection. Microsoft calls this “co-authoring.”

Note that in order to use co-authoring, the presentation must be stored in OneDrive, OneDrive for Business, or SharePoint Online, and you must be logged into your Microsoft 365 account. Also, co-authoring works in PowerPoint only if you have AutoSave turned on. To do it, move the AutoSave slider at the top left of the screen to On.

To share a document: Open it, then click the Share button in the upper-right part of the screen, and select Share. The “Send link” window opens. Enter the email addresses of the people with whom you want to collaborate and type in a message if you want.

srcset='https://b2b-contenthub.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/07/powerpoint-cheat-sheet-07-send-link-screen.png?quality=50&strip=all 482w, https://b2b-contenthub.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/07/powerpoint-cheat-sheet-07-send-link-screen.png?resize=257%2C300&quality=50&strip=all 257w, https://b2b-contenthub.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/07/powerpoint-cheat-sheet-07-send-link-screen.png?resize=144%2C168&quality=50&strip=all 144w, https://b2b-contenthub.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/07/powerpoint-cheat-sheet-07-send-link-screen.png?resize=72%2C84&quality=50&strip=all 72w, https://b2b-contenthub.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/07/powerpoint-cheat-sheet-07-send-link-screen.png?resize=412%2C480&quality=50&strip=all 412w, https://b2b-contenthub.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/07/powerpoint-cheat-sheet-07-send-link-screen.png?resize=309%2C360&quality=50&strip=all 309w, https://b2b-contenthub.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/07/powerpoint-cheat-sheet-07-send-link-screen.png?resize=214%2C250&quality=50&strip=all 214w' width='482' height='562' sizes='(max-width: 482px) 100vw, 482px'>Here’s how you invite others to collaborate in PowerPoint.
Preston Gralla / Foundry

By default, the people you share the document with can edit the document, but you can give them read-only access by clicking Anyone with the link can edit just above the input box, and on the “Share settings” screen that appears, select Can edit in the “More settings” area.  From that screen you can also set an expiration date for the sharing link and set a password that people to whom you’ve send the link will need to access the presentation. (If you use a business, enterprise, or education edition of Office, your IT department may have set up different default sharing permissions and options.)

In the “Send link” window, you can alternatively copy a link to the file and send that yourself instead of having PowerPoint send it for you, or send the link through Outlook. A final option is to send a copy of the presentation instead of the link, either as a PowerPoint presentation or as a PDF, but that option doesn’t allow live collaboration.

When you’re done, click the Send button.

To begin collaborating: When the email recipient gets your invitation to collaborate, they click a button or link to open the document, which opens in the PowerPoint web app in a browser, rather than in the PowerPoint desktop client. They can work with it in the web app or click Open in Desktop App and use it from the PowerPoint desktop client.

Different colored icons identify the different people working on the document. You’ll see all their comments, they’ll see yours, and you can see the changes everyone makes.

Collaborating on a presentation.
Preston Gralla / Foundry

You can do more than see each other’s work. Everyone can make comments, and others can respond to them, live. To make a comment, right-click an area and select Comment from the menu that appears. The Comments pane opens on the right. Type in your comment and click the arrow at the bottom of the comment, and everyone can see it. They can then respond, so that comments are threaded, making it easy to follow conversations.

You can open and close the Comments pane by clicking the Comments button towards the top right of the screen. From the pane, you can review people’s comments and make comments of your own.

If you want a co-worker who isn’t actively collaborating on the presentation to know you need their input on one of your comments, in the comment type @ and the first few letters of the person’s name, then choose their name from the list that appears. When you click the arrow to post the comment, they’ll get an email telling them they were @mentioned and linking to the comment in the presentation.

Be aware that how well real-time collaboration works depends on the strength of your internet connection. On slow or flaky connections, you won’t immediately see edits that other people make, and they won’t see yours immediately — there will be a lag. So it’s always best, when possible, to have the strongest connection possible when collaborating.

Use Microsoft 365 Copilot in PowerPoint

For an additional subscription fee, Microsoft 365 business users can use Microsoft’s genAI add-in, Microsoft 365 Copilot, directly in PowerPoint. You can have Copilot draft an entire presentation for you from scratch by describing the presentation in detail.

It can also create individual slides when you ask, can critique a presentation and point out unnecessary slides that can be deleted, and offer design advice. It can do a lot more as well, such as summarizing a slide deck a co-worker creates. If you have a Microsoft 365 Personal or Family subscription, some of those Copilot features are now bundled with your core subscription.

Generate a presentation draft from scratch

Many people will want to use Copilot to create a draft presentation. To do it, on PowerPoint’s opening screen, click the Create with Copilot button on the upper right. A screen appears that lets you describe your presentation and select a design for it.

Here’s where you type your prompt for Copilot to create a presentation.
Preston Gralla / Foundry

Describe the presentation in as much detail as possible, including not just the content, but the number of slides, tone and so on. Note that you have a 2,000-character limit. Underneath that, choose the presentation template Copilot has created for you, or click Change design to choose another one, if another one is available.

When you’re done typing your description, click the arrow to the right of the text input box. Copilot creates an outline of the presentation, showing you an overview of all the slides it will create. If you’re not happy with it, click the Edit prompt button (a pencil icon) to the right of the prompt, and describe in more detail what you’re looking for.

Copilot first presents an outline for the presentation.
Preston Gralla / Foundry

Once the outline looks good, click Generate new presentation, and Copilot will create all the actual slides for the presentation (not just a text outline).

If you want to keep the presentation Copilot created, click the Keep it button at the bottom of the screen and then either keep it as is, or edit it as you normally would in Copilot. (I strongly recommend reviewing and editing any Copilot output.) Click the trash can icon if you want to start over from scratch. If you do that, you’ll be given an option of saving the presentation before starting over, or deleting it entirely.

I’ve found it often takes multiple edits to the prompt to get exactly what you want. I’ve also found that even when I tell Copilot to create a presentation with specific number of slides, it doesn’t listen. Changing the prompt sometimes helps — for example, by emphasizing multiple times that you only want a specific number of slides. Even when you do that, though, you may have to edit the presentation so it’s at the length you want.

Here’s how the completed presentation generated by Copilot looks.Preston Gralla / Foundry

Generate a presentation draft from a document

In theory, you should be able to ask Copilot to create a presentation based on an existing document, rather than having to type in a description of what you want. In practice, though, that’s not necessarily true, at least not in my latest tests.

If the file you want to use as a source for your presentation is in OneDrive, you should be able to point Copilot at it, for example, giving its name and location. You should also be able to give Copilot the same “share” link that you send to collaborators, as detailed in the collaboration section of this article.

In my previous tests of Copilot in PowerPoint several months ago, that worked. And, in fact, when I started work on this article, it still worked. But Microsoft is constantly rejiggering Copilot, and in my latest tests, it was no longer able to do that, at least on the PCs I tested it on.

I found two extremely imperfect workarounds that sometimes halfway work. You can launch Copilot by itself from the Windows taskbar — not from inside PowerPoint — and point it at a file and ask it to create a presentation based on it. I did that by typing the following prompt:

Create a 5-slide presentation based on the document “C:UserspgralOneDriveCWColumnMS and OpenAI divorce.docx”

Copilot created the text for the slides, each of which was a bulleted list. I then launched PowerPoint and created a presentation using that text. Kludgy, but at least it worked.

You can also paste the text directly into PowerPoint’s Copilot prompt when you’re creating a new file. However, as a practical matter, that rarely works because of the 2000-character prompt limit.

Get design tips

You can also use Copilot to offer design tips after you’ve created a presentation. To do it, select Ask Copilot, and a Copilot pane appears on the right. You can ask it for general design tips for the overall presentation for individual slides, or you can be more targeted, such as asking for a different style — for example, more professional-looking, “homier,” and so on. Remember, you can keep iterating your suggestions until you get the exact tips you want.

Copilot can offer design tips to improve your presentation.
Preston Gralla / Foundry

Copilot has cannibalized some PowerPoint features

On the downside, Microsoft’s focus on Copilot in M365 has reduced the usefulness of PowerPoint in some ways. For example, there used to be a handy feature called Smart Lookup that let you conduct targeted web searches from inside PowerPoint. But at the beginning of 2025, Microsoft removed Smart Lookup from PowerPoint, saying that the feature has been deprecated.

Now the only way to search the web from inside PowerPoint is via Copilot, which lacks some features of Smart Lookup, notably the ability to highlight words or phrases in a document and trigger an automatic web search. And M365 Copilot isn’t available to business customers unless they pay the additional subscription fee.

The QuickStarter feature, which helped you create presentations, has also been eliminated and its features taken over by Copilot.

Use AutoSave as a safety net while you work

Worried about losing your work on a presentation because you forgot to constantly save it? Worry no more. AutoSave automatically saves your files for you, so you won’t have to worry about system crashes, power outages, PowerPoint crashes, and similar problems. Be aware, though, that it works only on documents that are stored in OneDrive, OneDrive for Business, or SharePoint Online.

You may think you’re already protected against these problems because of the AutoRecover feature built into earlier versions of Office. But AutoSave is significantly different and better than AutoRecover. AutoRecover doesn’t save your files in real time, so it’s easy for you to lose work. Instead, every several minutes it saves an AutoRecover file that you can try to recover after a crash.

But this feature doesn’t always work — for example, if you don’t properly open Office after the crash, or if the crash doesn’t meet Microsoft’s definition of a crash. And Microsoft notes, “AutoRecover is only effective for unplanned disruptions, such as a power outage or a crash. AutoRecover files are not designed to be saved when a logoff is scheduled or an orderly shutdown occurs.” And the files aren’t saved in real time, so you’ll lose several minutes of work even if all goes as planned.

AutoSave is turned on by default in PowerPoint for Microsoft 365 for.pptx files stored in OneDrive, OneDrive for Business, or SharePoint Online. To turn it off (or back on again), use the AutoSave button on the top left of the screen.

Using AutoSave may require some rethinking of your workflow. Many people are used to creating new presentations based on existing ones by opening the existing file, making changes to it, and then using Save As to save the new version under a different name, leaving the original file intact. Be warned that doing this with AutoSave enabled will save your changes in the original file. Instead, Microsoft suggests opening the original file and immediately selecting File > Save a Copy (which replaces Save As when AutoSave is enabled) to create a new version.

If AutoSave does save unwanted changes to a file, you can always use the Version History feature described next to roll back to an earlier version.

Review or restore earlier versions of a presentation

Another useful feature you should know about is Version History, which lets you go back to previous versions of a file, review them, and copy and paste from an older file to your existing one. You can also restore an entire old version.

To use it, with a file open, click the file name at the top of the screen. A dropdown menu appears with the location of the file and a Version History section. Click Version History, and the Version History pane appears on the right side of the screen with a list of the previous versions of the file, including the time and date they were saved.

Scrolling through previous versions of a presentation.
Preston Gralla / Foundry

Click any older version, and that version appears in a new window. Scroll through the version and copy any content you want. You can also overwrite your existing presentation with the earlier version or save the earlier version in a separate file.

Version History works best when used in conjunction with AutoSave. You can use it without AutoSave, but it’s not as useful because you don’t get as many saved versions to go back to.

Other useful PowerPoint for Microsoft 365 features

PowerPoint for Microsoft 365 has several more recent additions that are useful. Although they’re not as significant as the other features we’ve covered here, they’re worth knowing about.

Insert 3D models: This visual trick lets you show full three-dimensional details of an object. Select Insert > 3D Models and choose the 3D model you want to insert, either from your computer or from an online Microsoft library. Once it’s inserted, you can tilt or rotate the model any way you want during your presentation.

Text highlighter: Here’s a simple way to draw people’s attention to specific pieces of text: Use the new text highlighter to choose different colors to emphasize different portions of your presentation. It’s the same highlighter that Word has had for some time. To do it, select the text you want to highlight, then choose the Home tab, click the arrow next to the Text Highlight Color button (it looks like a highlighter pen), and choose your color from the dropdown.

Easier background removal: After inserting a picture, you can remove its background as a way to focus on the photo’s subject or a detail. In earlier versions of PowerPoint, you could remove backgrounds but had to use the drawing tools to select and fine-tune the item you wanted to keep; now the process is more automated. To do it, select the picture whose background you want to remove, then select Picture Format > Remove Background.

Royalty-free images: To get access to thousands of royalty-free images, icons, and stickers, go to Insert > Pictures > Stock Images, select the type of image you’re looking for from the top of the screen, and scroll though the images. You can also do a search for images as well.

Use a Bluetooth-enabled pen to control a presentation: If you’ve got a Bluetooth pen like the one that comes with a Microsoft Surface device, you can use its button as a clicker to move to the next slide or a previous one. First pair the pen with your computer. Then go to the Windows Settings app and select Bluetooth and devices > Pen & Windows Ink. Under Pen Shortcuts, check the box next to Allow apps to override the shortcut button behavior. A single click will now move to the next slide in a presentation, and holding down the button will move one slide backward in the presentation.

Record a presentation: You can record your presentation ahead of time and then share it with others. Click the Record button toward the top right of PowerPoint, then select either From beginning or From Current slide. You can choose from three views: Teleprompter, Presenter, and Slide. You can pause and retake the video as many times as you want. When you’re satisfied, click Export. You can then share the video with anyone you want. See Microsoft’s video recording blog post for details.

Use keyboard shortcuts

Using keyboard shortcuts is one of the best ways to accomplish tasks quickly in any version of PowerPoint. For instance, when you’re creating a presentation, you can press Ctrl-M to add a new slide. When you’re giving a presentation, you can press Ctrl-L to start the laser pointer. See “Handy PowerPoint keyboard shortcuts for Windows and Mac” for our favorite shortcuts.

This story was originally published in February 2021 and most recently updated in August 2025.

[ More Microsoft 365 cheat sheets, tips and tricks ]