Please have your developers use and become proficient at a basic graphic design program. Graphic designers by and large are your primary users and happen to use software that has a designer's logic to it. Powerpoint's basic functionality and workflow consistently ignores this "best practice" development approach and causes so many discontinuities (read: Frustration) that if it wasn't so maddening it would be laughable. That said, there are some basic things that would make the program more user friendly:

1. Bezier curves: This is a extremely critical function! Illustrator provides fine controls that makes curves easy and quick to do - here are a few:

a) make points/nodes constrainable to vertical/horizontal/45 degree axes using the shift/click combo.

b) Make points/nodes moveable my arrow key increments by using the arrow keys.

1. Preferences: (related to Bezier curves) Make it possible to specify (objects/shapes and shape nodes) increments if moves using the arrow keys.




2. Get rid of you ribbon and your format pane - and use a dockable/undockable tools strategy - . Your attempts at making tools user context sensitive nearly always guesses what the user's next move and it gets in the way instead of helps. It's more efficient for a designer to choose the next move - your approach gets in the way.




3. Short cut keys: provide greater customization control. This might actually solve the lion's share of user workflow impediments. Adobe does this very well - follow their experience in this respect...because it is clear that they are listening to graphic designers who do intense production work all day long.




4. Shapes: Why make it 2-3 clicks to get to the shape making tool? It should be available as a single click - and it should be a short cut key for basic shapes like squares and ellipses. These two shapes are the foundation for any design space - don't bury them under so many clicks!

Text/font:

a) Should ALWAYS maintain formatting of the original copy!!!!

Format tool: So extremely cumbersome as it is. Use a simple eyedropper instead and make a standard shortcut key to access it....your rule should always be to eliminate the number of clicks it takes to get to the action a designer/user is trying to perform. Again - Illustrator (and other design programs like Sketch.

The basic suggestions I've provided above would go a long ways to making your users more happy using Powerpoint. Your font/text formatting also needs some work.

Feel free contact me if you'd like. I could get you thousands of designers to provide the same input I just did - and this is just a start. I will not fill out a survey so don't send me one. This is a matter you will only be able to address effectively if you have direct contact with those who use your products day in and day out like me.

The idea is pretty simple and - I think - useful: auto-generate table of contents (ToC) based on the name of each section in PowerPoint.

For example, you have three sections: introduction, sample projects, and further reading. The aut-ToC would allow you to insert a ToC including the names of each section, and e.g. the number of the first slide in that section (1,8,15), and potentially other info (e.g. number of slides in that section). As you add/remove/change the sections and their names, the ToC would adjust automatically.

There would be different lay-outs for the ToC, e.g. with bullets points, in table format, etc.

"Design Ideas" WAS working GREAT until recently SOMETHING CHANGED. Now any time I try to create a list on the second slide, the feature does not give any suggestions with icons or smartart diagrams, just changes the background. Afterward, each slide is stuck in the specific design chosen in the first slide (everything from background to text size and shape). I used to be able to customize each individual slide by slide and not rely on an overall design from the first slide which made each slide unique and fun. Not anymore. And even when icon or smartart suggestions come up, they're not as good as they used to be (not as colorful or creative).