Five cool things to do with PowerPoint

Take your PowerPoint presentation to the next level

Use PowerPoint to go far beyond staid, boring slides and occasional flying text effects. Add live captioning and even translations powered by AI, create custom animations, and embed everything from nearly anywhere—it’s all possible with the latest versions of PowerPoint. Explore these cool things to do with PowerPoint in your next presentation.

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Make PowerPoint interactive

If you want to show the progress of a project or explain the history and growth of your organization, consider adding an interactive timeline. Create an interactive timeline in just one slide so you won’t only avoid bloating your presentation with individual slides, but you’ll also keep things simple.

There are plenty of presentation templates to choose from when considering the design and features of the interactive timeline you’d like to show. In addition, add SmartArt to create a basic timeline, highlighting milestones within your time period and ending in the present. Learn how to use SmartArt to create simple and advanced timelines.

Add live subtitles and translations

Add live subtitles to display as captions on your presentation, so no matter what you’re saying, you’ll be able to see your text displayed onscreen, even if you go off-script. This is an ideal solution for accessibility, ensuring that no matter who you’re presenting to, they won’t miss a word. Even translate directly to another language, so nobody will miss a word in any language you choose!

To turn on live subtitles and translations in your presentation:

• Select the Slide Show tab in the upper menu.
• In the section on the right marked Captions & Subtitles, check the box that says Always Use Subtitles.
• Select the Subtitle Settings dropdown menu to change options for subtitle placement, microphone device input, the language you speak, and the language to be displayed in subtitles.

This last option is especially compelling for translating your speech into one of dozens of languages supported by PowerPoint. It allows you to select the language that you speak in your presentation—and automatically translates into another language when displaying captions. Through AI integration and an online connection to live language databases, you overcome the common barriers of inaccessibility and language for anyone seeing your presentation. It’s important to ensure that you have an online connection while you’re presenting, otherwise live subtitles and translation won’t work. Also, we recommend a microphone headset for the highest levels of clarity.

Create custom animations

PowerPoint comes with a robust library of animation effects for text and images. Take these eye-catching tools even further by creating your own custom animations with motion paths tailored precisely to your own content.

To create a custom animation:

• Select an object on a slide and go to the Animations tab.
• In the Advanced Animation section, select Add Animation and scroll down to Motion Paths.
• Select Custom Path. Your cursor will now turn into a crosshair, and anywhere you select will be another point in your custom path.
• Hold down the left mouse button and draw a smooth, freehand path or select specific intervals on the slide to create a series of lines.
• Double-click the left mouse button to draw your endpoint and finish the path.

Embed everything

From YouTube and Windows Media Player videos to Excel spreadsheets, embed all kinds of files into a slide. Thanks to complete Microsoft 365 integration, inserting document types from other apps like Excel, such as spreadsheets, is easy. It’s helpful to visualize data directly in your presentation, instead of having to pause and open another application.

These can all be added under the Insert tab on the uppermost menu. Select Media on the far right and insert URLs to online videos or downloaded video files. Select Table and its dropdown menu to embed an Excel spreadsheet.

Quiz the audience

Add a fun quiz with correct and incorrect answers to entertain your audience! Place this at the end of a presentation to see how much information they’ve retained. Liven things up with animations and sound effects for right or wrong answers.

To create a PowerPoint interactive quiz:

• Go to the Insert tab in the upper menu and select Forms.
• Select New Quiz in the right-most panel that appears.
• Select Edit to directly write questions and answers in Microsoft Forms.

Microsoft Forms was developed to create surveys, quizzes, and polls that can be readily shared and embedded into different apps. Not only is it easy and effective, but it also unlocks design templates and versatile options. It’s just another example of how the Microsoft 365 ecosystem is all tied to each other.

When it comes to creating a unique, interactive PowerPoint presentation, the possibilities don’t end here. Check out our presentation tips and learn how to prep for and deliver a winning presentation, get inspired by design ideas, and incorporate visual aids into your speeches.