The editor has had its first proper going-over. Every button in it was clicked — all of them, one at a time, on a real slide — and the ones that did nothing were fixed. Twenty of them did nothing. On top of that there is a new Insert tab, a New Slide button with nine layouts behind it, and the editor no longer loses your work when you refresh the page.
Like the search update before it, this is less about adding features and more about closing gaps. A button that looks live and isn't is worse than no button at all, and there were more of those than there should have been. They are gone.
Everything You Insert, In One Place
There is a new tab called Insert, and it holds everything that puts something onto a slide: pictures, shapes, icons, illustrations, stickers, frames, grids, charts, text boxes, WordArt, video, audio, links, comments and data. Eighteen buttons, grouped the way PowerPoint groups them.
These used to be scattered down the left rail — twenty-nine buttons deep, which meant scrolling to find a chart. They have been moved, not copied. There is exactly one route to each one now, so nothing is in two places and nothing competes for the same job.
The rail still exists and still matters. It kept the panels you return to while you work — Pages, Layers, Themes, Brand, Animate, Effects, Draw, Comments, AI, Assets, Components and Projects. Fifteen buttons instead of twenty-nine, and you can see all of them without scrolling.
New Slide, Nine Layouts
New Slide no longer drops a blank slide and leaves you to it. It opens a gallery of nine layouts, the same nine PowerPoint offers: Title slide, Title and content, Section header, Two content, Comparison, Title only, Blank, Content with caption, and Picture with caption.
Pick one and the slide arrives with its placeholders already positioned and already editable. Click a heading and type. The picture layouts arrive with a real frame, which means Insert picture, Crop and export all behave exactly as they do for a frame you placed yourself — no special case, nothing that only half works.
One detail worth knowing: layouts are stored as proportions of the slide, not fixed pixels. Change your slide size from 16:9 to 4:3 and a layout still lands correctly. It also means nothing here creates a slide-master dependency, so a deck built from these layouts still opens cleanly in PowerPoint, Google Slides and Keynote.
Underneath the gallery are three more: duplicate the slide you are on, build slides from a pasted outline, or reuse slides from a design you saved earlier. The outline one is quietly useful — paste your notes, and every line without an indent becomes a new slide title while the indented lines under it become that slide's bullets.
Nothing Is Lost Any More
Two faults shared one cause: nothing was watching for the page going away. Refreshing the browser wiped the whole deck. No warning, no recovery, no way back. Closing the tab never asked whether you wanted to save. Neither of those should ever have been true, and both are fixed.
Your deck is now written to storage a couple of seconds after you stop typing, and it comes straight back the next time the editor opens. Slides, speaker notes, comments and anything you set to show on every slide — all of it. If you try to close the tab with unsaved changes, the browser stops you first, the way PowerPoint does. Save the design and it stops asking.
There is also a new pair of buttons in Projects: Save a copy to my computer, and Open a file. Until now, everything you saved lived inside your browser and nowhere else, which meant clearing your browsing data took your designs with it. Now you can keep a real file — back it up, email it, open it on another computer.
A Toolbar You Can Read
The toolbar icons were all one shade of near-black at nineteen pixels. They are now bigger and coloured by family, which is the thing that makes PowerPoint's ribbon readable: your eye learns where things live before you learn the labels.
Text tools are Office blue. Drawing is orange. Media is teal, data green, design purple, presenting red, arranging indigo, and Delete is the only red bin on the screen. A command keeps the same colour everywhere it appears, so Duplicate is the same indigo in all three format tabs.
Twenty-six of the icons the eye lands on most were redrawn properly as multi-colour artwork rather than tinted glyphs — the palette has four different paint dots, the picture icon has a gold sun over green hills, the record button has a red dot on a grey camera.
Named The Way You Already Know
Millions of people already know PowerPoint. Where a button did the same job under a different word, the word changed.
Painter is now Format painter. Under and Strike are Underline and Strikethrough. Numbers is Numbering, Spacing is Line spacing. To front and To back are Bring to front and Send to back. Flip H and Flip V are spelled out. Page size is Slide size. Properties is the Format pane and Layers is the Selection pane. From start and From current are From beginning and From current slide.
Four icons were also plainly wrong and have been replaced. Flip vertical was showing a camera-switch symbol. Font was showing a download tray.
Twenty Buttons That Did Nothing
The audit was done by clicking, not by reading the code. A slide was built with text, a shape, an icon, a frame and an illustration on it, and then every button was pressed and the result measured.
The whole Crop group in Shape format was dead — Crop, Zoom in, Zoom out, Reset, Done. All four Icon format buttons were dead. Both Graphic format recolour buttons were dead. Apply in Design was dead. Twelve buttons in total, and every one of them already had working code sitting behind it; the toolbar simply was not calling it.
Presenter view, Rehearse timings, Record slide show and the accessibility Check button also did nothing. Rehearse was the worst of them: it started timing you and never showed the panel.
The five items in the top-right menu — Create new design, Open, Settings, Keyboard shortcuts and Help — were placeholders that printed a message and stopped. All five now do the job they claim.
And the Shapes gallery, seventy-five shapes, was fully built with no button anywhere pointing at it. It is now on Home, where PowerPoint keeps it.
Themes Change Properly Now
The Design tab had a button labelled Colours that opened the full theme gallery and changed the fonts as well as the colours. It was never a colour picker. It is now labelled Themes, which is what it is.
Worse than the label: picking a second theme often did nothing visible. Five of the twenty-five themes carry gradient backgrounds, and once you picked one of those five, the gradient stuck permanently. Every theme chosen afterwards changed its name and left the old background in place. Fixed — twenty-five themes now give twenty-five results.
Colour Without The Hex Code
Eight commands used to ask for a colour by popping up a browser box and expecting you to type something like #7C3AED from memory. Icon colour, shape fill, shape outline, font colour, background, highlight and brand colour were all like this.
They now open a proper picker: a colour wheel, a hex box if you prefer typing, your own theme's colours, the ten you used most recently, and fifteen standard swatches. Outline and highlight have a None button, because removing a colour is a thing people want.
Help That Knows The Editor
Help & support used to print "Help center would open" and do nothing. It now opens a proper help window built the way PowerPoint's is — topics down the left, the article on the right, and a search box.
Forty-six topics across twelve categories, covering the editor's real features and nothing it does not have. This is separate from the site FAQ on purpose: the FAQ answers questions about the shop, this answers questions about the editor.
Still To Come
This is a first pass, not a finished job. By our own reckoning the editor is somewhere around forty per cent of where it should be, and the remaining sixty will land the same way this did — in sessions, one area at a time, with everything clicked and checked before it ships.
Next on the list: a real table you can insert and edit, slide numbers and footers, the horizontal bar chart's axis labels, and six buttons on the Editing rail that still describe features rather than perform them. Those six will either be built or removed. They will not be left sitting there looking live.
Related: 3D elements are now live in the editor
Related: the search engine got an update too
Related: modern website layouts