Iterative processes are the core of any business, and Microsoft PowerPoint provides several templates for cyclic processes: basic cycle, text cycle, block cycle, etc. Cyclic diagrams provide an easy way to illustrate a circular flow of money and goods of the buy, product, and sell process; or steps of iterative decision making of the marketing process.

When you create a presentation for a graduate thesis or dissertation, often, you need to insert Greek letters into the slide. Mathematical symbols and Greek letters are pervasive today and used everywhere, from physics to social science. You may use the equation block for inserting those symbols, but this block will have different format settings than the rest of your text, and you will not be able to edit it in older versions of Microsoft Office. If you need to insert just a symbol, use the Symbol dialog box or Alt+code shortcuts.

After recent updates, the ribbon in Microsoft PowerPoint can take up to 1/3 of the available screen space. Microsoft Office help tells that you can hide or unhide your ribbon, but you cannot reduce the size of your ribbon, or size of the text or the icons. False! You can change the mode and remove unnecessary white space around buttons, and, thus, reduce the ribbon size.

When you prepare your presentation, you should adapt it to the device, which will be used for projecting it. Some devices or even laptops can have different sizes, so you can need to change the sizes of your presentation.

In contrast to other Microsoft Office applications such as Word, Outlook, and Excel, PowerPoint doesn't have the option that changes how to open hyperlinks by clicking with pressing or holding Ctrl or without Ctrl.

It is now popular to create PowerPoint slides with diagrams or charts drawn using the chalk or marker effect. If you create slides with this effect, it will be great to create an agenda or other slides in the same style. For some PowerPoint slides, you can add a background image with a chalk or marker effect:

When you prepare a PowerPoint presentation, you can add some information from an external source file. For example, a lot of presentations contain some data from an Excel spreadsheet or Excel charts.

Hand-drawn diagrams and flowcharts became popular lately, but you cannot use default PowerPoint shapes to create them. In this tip, you will see how to create a custom arrow shape with a freehand effect.

PowerPoint provides a lot of tools that help you to create unique and memorable presentations. Custom shapes allow you to develop reusable pieces and use them many times in the presentation or multiple presentations.

For some charts or diagrams, you need to create a regular polygon – equiangular (all angles are equal) or equilateral (all sides have the same length). E.g., equilateral triangle, regular square, etc.