PowerPoint has been playing a pivotal role in presentations of all shapes and sizes for over three decades. With vast capabilities and the ability to help users impactfully and derisively share information and data in actionable ways, it's easy to see why. It has evolved since its inception in order to keep up with the times, and those using these tools in 2024 are going to find that video content is going to be key to success.

Numerous books, blogs, and courses recommend using pictures instead of text in the presentation. Slides with pictures, charts, and diagrams can keep the audience focused on what you are talking about instead of diverting the participants' attention to reading the contents of the slides. Often pictures play the role of a distracting or, vice versa, enticing maneuver.

PowerPoint has a handy feature that allows you to freeze an object on a slide. By locking objects from moving, you will not worry about hitting the wrong object when aligning, grouping, or resizing the rest of the slide elements. Locking will also allow you to more easily work with the object's content without fear of automatically resizing or displacing the object when you edit its content.

PowerPoint provides an ability to create sections to make organizing, navigating, and managing your slides easier. Sections in PowerPoint are just a way to group slides. These groups can be moved or deleted together, but nothing more! Unlike Word, slides grouped into sections in PowerPoint cannot be formatted together, cannot have their own numbering, etc.

Every inserted or created table in a PowerPoint slide uses the color scheme of the presentation theme. It can take hours to customize the table to your liking.

A convenient way to display data is to present it in a tabular form - in the form of a grid of rows and columns. You can create or insert different types of tables into your PowerPoint slides. You can also apply different formatting to the entire table or a selected area, such as a cell, multiple cells, rows, or columns.

Usually, the first row of the table is formatted as a header row and contains column headings, and the leftmost column contains row headings. In addition, the default style of a new blank table is formatted to highlight (band) every other row to help readers distinguish between individual lines of information:

If you have a presentation with some charts and reports you never know how often you will need to update it. E.g., you create a quarter performance report and receive a new data every hour. In this case, instead of PowerPoint tables and charts it is better to embed Excel object. The information automatically updates after updates in the Excel table.

Tables are very popular objects in Microsoft PowerPoint. They present data, show the dependencies, etc. Some diagrams, such as risk and SWOT analysis, can be presented in the form of tables.

By default, if you type more text than fits into the placeholder, PowerPoint applies an AutoFit (if not disabled). PowerPoint uses different AutoFit algorithms for different objects: