Damn. I spent the last 15 min trying to jamb my suggestion into a limited character box. What a waste of time. What wouldn't be a waste of time is for the developers of MS PPT to tweak the placeholder object. I'd like to see a specific placeholder for images that a developer of templates is capable of specifying a locked aspect ratio. When a user chooses a layout option that includes an image specific placeholder, upon clicking it to choose the photo, a popup is triggered in which the image chosen is shown with the predetermined aspect crop lines and outside the borders is grayed out. This crop can be moved and resized. Do not include more options in the popup other than framing the image and do not allow changing of the aspect ratio. It results in a much more layman friendly template that a dev creates for them, which is the point of a template.

We have a number of unique corporate templates, and for business reasons many of them have independent color themes.

However, it is common to move content across templates- something was used in a sales template, now it needs to be moved into a training template, then the same content/image/slide needs to be moved into an executive deck template.

It seems that tables (and perhaps other objects- all shapes?) lose their color formatting when moved across decks that have different color themes. I'm assuming this is because of the template's theme or custom color schema. The result is that we have to recolor all of these from scratch, which adds no value.

Proposed solution: when copying a slide or shape or table (or whatever this applies to), pop up options and let the user decide:

(1) just paste - colors may change
(2) paste, but retain the existing colors (ignore theme colors; future changes to the theme will not affect this slide/shape/table)
(3) ? add this slide (whole slide only) to the master deck with a separate theme color applied (if this can be applied by section, for example- then the new section would also automagically be created)

There may be an even better solution, but ultimately I just need the ability to copy/paste a table that has shading or a design color applied, and retain that original look in the destination document... without a lot of manual rework

Animation Feature
1. Animate background slide - Custom/Clip Art/My Picture
2. Set it on timer or continuously while keeping the slides active/alive.
3. Include different animated effects and colours.
Example - "Think of burning flames effect"

Microsoft Cortana
Insert Microsoft Cortana (nice voice by the way-wink, wink) as a slide text narrator for when creating explanations slides/full presentations.

Sound/Music
1. Insert more options such as fade in-out when inserting my own sound/music for the slide show.
2. Insert a Repeat option, so that I can control how and what slide(s) I want the music file play per slide or slides.

I think by having these options/tools in ppt, it would help enhance the presentation of the slide(s) and bring a realistic feel and sound to it.

When presenters pack/email/transfer a slide show, it would be helpful for those who are seeing it, to hear a voice "explaining" what the slide show is about.