Here are some new features coming soon to PowerPoint

Microsoft is rolling out new PowerPoint Smart Layouts, refreshed themes, a redesigned Design tab, and a simpler file open experience.

Here at Neowin, we cover Teams, Excel, Outlook, and Copilot quite extensively, but one product in the Microsoft 365 suite is PowerPoint. The tool is quite heavily used in work, school, and personal environments to ideate and present ideas to a variety of personnel. Now, Microsoft has shared some new features and upcoming capabilities coming soon to PowerPoint.

In the past few weeks and months, Microsoft has added 13 new Smart Layouts to PowerPoint, which includes timelines, lists, and "Meet the Team" templates. The categories have been modified as well, and the company says that it is "addressing longstanding editing friction with improvements like multi-image insert support and clearer placeholder text for unedited nodes." These layouts are rolling out right now, with full availability scheduled for next month. Microsoft also plans to ship more layouts soon.

In the same vein, 13 new themes have been added to the Design tab, and some old ones have been retired. The latter can be added back through Backstage, and previous presentations using those themes remain unaffected too. The Design ribbon itself has been updated too for ease of use. These changes are live for Beta customers on Windows and Mac, with full availability scheduled for next month.

But perhaps one of the most interesting enhancements is the modernized and redesigned file open experience. You'll no longer see multiple dialog boxes for authentication and loading and will instead just see a single progress dialog that explains the same steps. Microsoft says that this revamp has rolled out to "most" Windows and Mac users already, but full rollout will be complete by next month, the same as the other upcoming capabilities listed above.

Have you received any of the aforementioned features yet? Which one do you like best? Let us know in the comments section below!

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Posted Tuesday 14 July 2026 at 8:10 am AEST (my time).

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