From my experience with presentations, I think the most useful device to help me keep to the total alloted time is to keep time at the level of each slide, relative to the timing I've set for each slide while rehearsing.

Ideally, I would like to be able to do the following:

1) for each slide in my presentation, set a certain time that it ideally takes to describe it in the live presentation; I know this can be done with the Rehearse Timings feature, but what Powerpoint cannot do is the next step...

2) while presenting, have a timer in the Presenter View that shows me by how many seconds/minutes I am either ahead or behind my "schedule"

As I said, I know that Powerpoint can advance automatically through the slides based on the timings you've set for each slide under Rehearse Timings. But I would rather want to just be shown my standing (the total timing so far) relative to the total ideal duration of the already-presented slides, so something like "-00:10" if I am 10 seconds ahead, or "+1:00" if I am one minute behind the total schedule.

When you insert smartart and go to the Design ribbon, there are some options where you can change colors (accent type or different color schemes). For example, each shape might be a different shade of green from light green to dark green.

Often, SmartArt isn't the ideal solution and users create multi-shape images to visually communicate a message. If they want to replicate a diverse color scheme, or if the color schemes available for that SmartArt are simply insufficient, it is tedious to manually create the appropriate color scheme across shapes, especially if it has to be done using 'more colors' because the standard palette isn't sufficient.

I'd like to suggest allowing a user to select a range of shapes, select a start and end color, and use a gradient command that would assign each shape in the selection a corresponding gradient color between the original two RGB values. Maybe there could be some smart logic around [Left] and {Top] to try to assign the gradient in a meaningful way, but just having shapes with the right gradient would be a great start, a user can just use some helper shapes on the side to use the paintbrush and move the formatting around so they are on the desired shapes (or there could be a wizard that allows each shape to be assigned the appropriate gradient level)

A natural extension of this idea would be to allow a 'true' gradient go across multiple shapes- instead of <dark Green, mid Green, light green> solid shapes, the top shape would start the gradient (100-80), mid shape might be 60-30, and the bottom shape would be 20-0 so there is a natural gradient that ties multiple shapes together.

The second idea is for people with better graphics skills than me, but the first idea (applying interim colors of foxed intervals is something I'd use on a regular basis.

in Powerpoint 2010 we could use Clipart and customize it to include company graphics, which were indexed and thus searchable via keywrds.
That allowed our users to create a presentation with our company's concepts and graphics.
Starting in PowerPoint 2013 this option was removed, and replaced by 2 options:
1. The Bing online search for images and clip-arts (which searches for generally available graphics on the Internet)
2. Connect to the user's OneDrive and add files from there. (which are personal user files)
Both of these options do not deliver what we need, which is a centrally managed (add / remove / edit keywords etc.) graphics repository, which should also be available offline (for the laptop users).
I would like to see a feature under the "online pictures" (configurable through GPO) that adds the corporate's custom graphics as an image source.
This feature is mostly missed in Powerpoint, but it is also missed in Word (maybe even Excel).

See http://technotoolbox.blogspot.com/2009/09/creating-masks-in-powerpoint.html for an example of what I'm trying to describe. There are at least three ways to accomplish this (I use merge shapes/fragment, which looks good but is not editable afterwards)

Suggestion: make this a built-in feature, where it is easier to edit when the underlying content changes.

Possible implementation: be able to tag shapes as "mask" and "clear". If a "clear" shape is above any "mask" shapes in z-order, simply treat that portion of the mask shape(s) as 100% transparent (I assume the "clear" shape is actually set to "no fill", although maybe there is a use case where partial transparency or gradient would still add value).

This way, the clear shape can be easily moved/resized if the slide is edited, and can also be given motion paths or other shape effects, which would allow some pretty cool implementations.

and of course, please expose the relevant properties to VBA :)

At a prior employer, we had some VBA code that would turn each slide into an image, and paste them all into a Word template (inside a table) where the slide image was in the left column, and we created the instructions in the right column. The template was used to create the facilitator guide (for train-the-trainer). At some point in time the PowerPoint or Word object model changed and it quit working,

Why not just use slide notes, you ask? Because there may be other activities (like working on flipcharts, team exercises, etc. that wouldn't have dedicated slides, and those should be part of the facilitator guide. In addition, the level of formatting available and visible space makes a separate guide much easier to use.

I'm not suggesting that MS create the whole template for a facilitator guide (although that would be ok too)- just that it would be nice to be able to have a "one-click" solution to paste the slide images into another MS program (word or excel?) rather than exporting the whole deck as individual images, then having to import them individually into the rows of a table in Word (or Excel).

During Presentation View, add an option to enable showing the number for the current animation in the corner during a presentation. For example, on a slide with 3 animations, show "2" in a box in the corner of the screen when the second animation gets triggered.

This is helpful when running through a presentation and making sure everything lines up. The Animation Pane is a nice first-level view, but since it auto-plays all animations (or every animation from a selected point), it's hard to see the how the slide would look when presented (especially with pauses between animations).

Enabling the view of the animation number would help with "debugging" any misplaced events that need to be moved and help keep speaker's notes in sync.