---
title: "The PowerPoint features I use in every deck, and the ones I've never once needed"
date: 2026-08-16T00:00:00Z
updated: 2026-08-14T08:07:26Z
tags: ["PowerPoint", "Slide Design", "Judgment", "Efficiency", "Communication"]
canonical: https://bianca.codes/blog/powerpoint-features-i-use-in-every-deck/
---

# The PowerPoint features I use in every deck, and the ones I've never once needed

_Twenty decks, five features doing the real work, and four with a permanent ribbon seat I never once needed. An honest audit, not a hidden-features round-up._

Last month I sat down and actually counted. Twenty decks, pulled from the last six months of client and internal work, and I went through the ribbon group by group asking one question: did I touch this on purpose, or did I never open this tab at all.

Five groups came back with every deck. A handful more showed up occasionally, tied to a specific kind of request. And a short list of features that have had a permanent home in the ribbon for years, features Microsoft keeps improving and re-announcing, came back with a flat zero. Not "rarely." Zero, across twenty decks that ranged from a twelve-slide stakeholder update to an eighty-slide tender response.

That's not a hot take about PowerPoint being bloated. Most of what's in the ribbon is there because someone, somewhere, builds the kind of deck it's for. This is the narrower and more useful question: for the decks I actually build, internal reporting, stakeholder updates, the odd tender response, which features are doing real work, and which ones are furniture I've never had a reason to sit in.

> The problem isn't that PowerPoint has too many features. It's that most of them were built for a kind of deck I don't build.

## The five doing the actual work

**Slide Master.** Everything else on this list is downstream of this one. If your title text, spacing, and colour choices live on individual slides instead of the layouts, every fix is a fix times however many slides copied that formatting. Slide Master turns "make it consistent" into a one-place edit instead of a slide-by-slide hunt. The Build It landing on 18 August walks through exactly this: rebuilding a whole deck's branding from the Master in about ten minutes. This post is the reason that one is worth reading, not the other way around.

**Design Ideas.** Designer isn't creative, and it doesn't need to be. Feed it a slide with your actual content already on it, a title and some bullet points or a stat, and it proposes layouts you'd otherwise spend fifteen minutes nudging text boxes to approximate. I don't take the suggestion as-is more than half the time, but even the ones I reject give me a better starting arrangement than a blank layout does. It's a speed tool, not a taste tool.

**Morph.** This one has a narrow job and does it well: showing the same objects change state, position, or size across two slides, so the transition reads as movement rather than a cut. It's genuinely good for "here's the before, here's the after" or walking through a process one step revealing at a time. It is not a general-purpose transition you sprinkle across a deck for polish, and it's worth knowing upfront that it doesn't apply to charts, so if the thing you're trying to animate is a chart series, Morph won't help you and you should stop looking for a way to make it.

**Align and Distribute, plus the Selection Pane.** I wrote up [the two-click version of this](/blog/align-objects-powerpoint-two-clicks/) separately, because it's the fastest fix for the single most common visual tell of an amateur deck: objects that are almost lined up. Almost-aligned reads as sloppy even when nobody in the room could say why. The Selection Pane is the part people skip and shouldn't, because once a slide has more than about six objects stacked and grouped, finding the one buried underneath everything else by clicking is slower than just naming it.

**Sections.** Slide Sorter with sections turned on is how I navigate a deck longer than fifteen slides, and it's how I rehearse: collapse the sections, and suddenly the whole deck is a five-line outline you can talk through before you've opened a single slide in full. It's also the fastest way to hand a reviewer "just look at the appendix" without them scrolling past forty slides to find it.

## The four with a permanent ribbon seat and no assignment

**3D Models.** I understand the appeal for product decks, where an actual rotatable object is the point. I have never built a deck where a 3D model was the right way to show a data point, a process, or a decision. If your job is presenting products, this is probably on your five list instead of mine. For internal reporting, it's a button I've never clicked with intent.

**Zoom, both Summary and Section.** The pitch is genuinely appealing: a slide that lets you jump between sections non-linearly, presenting them in whatever order the room's questions demand. In practice, every deck I build gets reordered and re-sectioned right up until the morning it's presented, and Zoom is fragile against exactly that kind of last-minute reshuffle. The feature works. My decks just don't stay still long enough to make it worth the setup.

**SmartArt.** Not useless, and I won't pretend otherwise, but it produces a specific, recognisable look, the same handful of arrow-and-circle arrangements everyone else's SmartArt also produces. When I actually have a relationship or a flow to show, a plain chart or a custom set of shapes built on the grid usually reads better and looks less like a template default. SmartArt is fast when fast is the only requirement. It's rarely what the slide actually needed.

**Cameo and Recording Studio.** These are built for a workflow I don't have: producing a video where you are the presenter on the slide, whether that's a self-paced training module or a recorded talk. If that's your deck, Cameo genuinely earns its keep, and it stacks well with Morph for animated presenter effects. My decks get presented live, in a room, by a person who isn't on camera inside the slide. The feature isn't bad. It's built for a job I don't do.

## The way to think about it

None of this is a verdict on the features themselves. It's an audit of fit between a specific kind of deck and a specific set of tools, and the fit changes the moment the deck type changes. Build customer-facing sales decks and Cameo might be your daily driver. Produce training content and Recording Studio moves straight onto the five list. The exercise that's actually worth doing isn't "which PowerPoint features are secretly good," it's counting, honestly, which ones show up in your own last twenty decks, because that number will disagree with mine and with whatever list a keynote demo tries to sell you.

The Hot Take landing on 19 August pushes on the flip side of the Slide Master point: a template that lives in muscle memory instead of the Master isn't actually a template. Between the two, that's most of what's worth knowing about where PowerPoint's real leverage sits, and where it's just ribbon real estate.

## Frequently Asked Questions

### **Doesn't Designer just recommend stock photography I'll never use?**

Sometimes, and I skip those suggestions. But Designer also proposes layout and spacing options using only your existing content, no stock imagery involved, and that's the half I actually use. Ignore the photo suggestions and keep the layout ones.

### **What about Speaker Coach, shouldn't that be on the never-needed list?**

It would be, except I haven't built enough decks I personally present live to have a real answer either way. This list is specifically about deck-building features, not delivery-coaching ones, which is a genuinely different skill and a different audit.

### **Isn't SmartArt fine for a simple bullet hierarchy?**

For a basic hierarchy, sure, it's a reasonable default. The problem shows up once the relationship is more specific than "these things are nested," and SmartArt's fixed shapes start fighting the actual structure instead of representing it.

### **Does Morph work if the audience isn't on Microsoft 365?**

Morph is a build-time feature. Once the deck is finished and exported, or presented from a machine with PowerPoint installed, the transition plays regardless of what the audience is running. The requirement is on your machine while you're building it, not theirs while they're watching it.

### **What if I do produce training videos, does the never-needed list flip?**

Largely yes. Cameo and Recording Studio would move to my five, and something from the current five, probably Sections, might drop off, since a linear video doesn't need the same non-linear navigation a live, rearranged-that-morning deck does. The list is a function of the deck type, not a ranking of the features.

### **Why isn't Copilot on either list?**

Because it's not a single feature with one job the way Morph or Slide Master is. It shows up differently depending on what you ask it for, and it deserves its own honest audit rather than a single line item here.