What's new & versions — PPPTools Library

#	Component	Version	updated
1	Add-in	2.3.0.0	06/09/2026
2	Library server	1.4.321	21/09/2026
3	Online help	1.0.284	20/09/2026
4	Library contents	As of 22/08/2026	22/08/2026

Add-in 2.3.0.0 06/09/2026

CHG Work area & grid: the colours have moved into a section of their own, and the single lines have their own colour pot. The colour block used to sit inside "Which lines", among the eight tick boxes - but those ticks only ever governed the calculated grid, while the colours governed the single lines below just as much. It now sits behind both, as its own "Colours" section, and the tick boxes are called "Which grid lines" so it is clear what they reach. With that comes a fifth pot: until now a single line without a colour of its own quietly took the colour meant for axes, thirds and the golden ratio - there simply was no pot for it. It has one now, and it starts out in that same grey, so nothing looks different until you change it. A line divider and some air before "Single lines" also mark where the calculated rule ends and the exceptions by hand begin. created 06/09/2026
NEW Work area & grid: the single lines now have presets of their own. Until now one preset carried both the grid and the list of single lines, and loading it replaced things you never meant to touch - a grid preset emptied the list of lines, and anyone who wanted a preset of "lines only" had to switch off every tick under "Which lines" as well. There are now two lists: the grid presets sit at the top of the "Grid" tab, the line presets sit down in the "Single lines" section, and each fills exactly the section it sits in and leaves the other alone. That also makes something possible that no preset could do before: laying the same set of special lines - header, logo edge, text boundary - over any grid you like. Both lists come from the same store, so the levels shipped, team and your own work as before, and a grid and a set of lines are allowed to share a name. Existing presets that carry both are split into two entries on first use, one of them marked "(lines)", so nothing is lost. created 06/09/2026
NEW Work area: the margins can now be kept as templates. What the grid has had for a while, the work area can do too - store a set of margins under a name and fetch it back in any presentation. The list comes from three levels: shipped with PPPTools, provided by the team, or your own, where the more specific level wins. Three come along: margin 1 cm, margin 2 cm, and header and footer clear. Picking a template only fills the four fields; it reaches the presentation with "Save", so that a look into the list never moves the work area. A template carries the four margins and nothing else - the colours and the reading "Measured from" belong to you and not to the template, so whoever fetches one from the team sees it in their own reading and keeps their own colours. Saving needs the Standard licence, just like setting the work area itself; picking one is free. created 06/09/2026
CHG Work area & grid: the list "Measured from" now also sits in the "Grid" tab, next to the single lines. The switch already applied to those lines, but it could only be reached over in the "Work area" tab - so anyone working on a grid did not find it and took it to be missing. The two lists are two windows onto one setting: change it in one place and you find it changed in the other. The grid's own margin fields are deliberately left out and stay measured from the slide edge - they are indents rather than positions, and they end up inside presets, where a personal reading has no business being. created 06/09/2026
FIX Setting the work area now happens in one place only. The old task pane had its own work-area boxes with a "Save" button, and that button wrote the work area back out of those boxes - usually as four zeros. So anyone who set the margins in the new pane "Work area & grid" and later pressed "Save" over in the old pane lost them again, without a word. The boxes are gone, and with them the buttons Save, Load, Remove, "Draw work area" and "Create guides"; what is left of that section is the slide size, for looking up only. The work area is set in the pane "Work area & grid", tab "Work area" - the two places that used to point at the old section now open that pane. Setting the work area needs a Standard licence there, as it did before; showing it, drawing it and clearing it stay free. created 06/09/2026
NEW Work area: the colour of the work area markers can now be chosen - separately for the guides and for the drawn objects. Two pots, because the objects print and have to fit the slide, while the guides never print and sit next to the grid lines. Until now both were fixed to the same blue, and setting a grid in a similar blue left you unable to tell them apart. The choice belongs to you and stays put across every presentation. If the lines are already there, changing the colour lays them again in the front presentation and recolours the objects - for guides the colour is part of how they are recognised, and simply leaving them would have turned them into foreign lines. created 05/09/2026
NEW Work area: the margins and the single grid lines can now be entered either from the slide edge or from the slide centre. PowerPoint reports the position of its guides from the slide centre - read a value there and you can now type it straight across instead of converting it. Only display and input change; what gets stored and calculated is still measured from the slide edge. The reading belongs to you and stays put across every presentation. created 05/09/2026
NEW Grid: a new button removes only the guides of the grid currently set up, instead of all of them. Keeping existing lines and adding to them left you with two grids on top of each other and no way to clear just one. PPPTools recalculates the definition and matches the lines by orientation, position and colour; lines moved by hand stay put. The button is free, no Pro licence needed. created 05/09/2026
NEW Grid: alongside divide and fixed step you can now keep a list of single lines. Each row gets a description, a side - left, right, top or bottom -, a distance and, if you want, a colour of its own. That puts lines into the grid that fit no even pattern: the bottom of the header, or where the logo stops. The rows come in addition to divide or fixed step and are stored in the presets. created 05/09/2026
NEW Work area: two new buttons above the tab bar place the work area and the grid set up in the Grid tab as guides - and the same click takes them away again. Both apply in either tab. They cannot show and hide: PowerPoint has a single switch for all guides, and that one still sits above them. When removing, PPPTools recognises its own lines by orientation, position and colour. created 05/09/2026
NEW Work area: the slide size and the remaining working area are now shown in centimetres in the pane. Four margins on their own do not tell you how much room is left, and without the slide size beside them you cannot tell whether two centimetres is a lot or a little. With no work area set the two sizes are identical - the whole slide is then the working area. created 05/09/2026
CHG Work area: the four margin fields are now paired by axis - left, right, top, bottom - instead of running clockwise. Anyone entering one margin almost always enters the opposite one right after, and those two now sit next to each other. The grid tab lists its own margins in the same order. Also corrected: the label on the summary line named a different order than the numbers beside it - both now read left, right, top, bottom. created 05/09/2026
NEW Work area & grid: the same grid into all open presentations. A switch next to the target writes one click into every file currently open instead of just the front one. Each presentation is recalculated, because slide size and work area differ there - what carries over is the recipe, not the result, so a grid worked out for 16:9 still lands correctly in a 4:3 deck. Because "replace existing" clears up in windows nobody is looking at, and removed guides do not come back with Ctrl+Z, you are asked first and told how many presentations are involved. The switch belongs to the single click, not to the grid: it is off again after every start and is not stored in any preset. created 05/09/2026
FIX The drawn work area came out red instead of blue. A colour channel ended up in the wrong place during conversion, so the four edges landed on the slide in red. They are blue again. created 05/09/2026
FIX The work area did not arrive when opening a file. Align, distribute and the puzzle read the work area from the add-in - but on opening a presentation it was still filled the old way, and that way only knows the presentation level. Anyone who had set their work area under "me" or through the team did not get it at all: the three tools saw zero margins until you had saved once in the pane. The full order of precedence is now resolved on opening and on every window switch - presentation before team default before your own before factory. The window switch was needed because the work area applies once for all open windows: switching used to leave the previous presentation's work area in place. Also fixed: with the frame set to "work area" the preview showed the work area, but what got written covered the whole slide. created 05/09/2026
NEW Work area & grid: draw the work area on the slide. One button places the four edges as objects on the current slide. Guides cannot do this: they cannot be set per slide - the finest level is the layout - and they never print. What gets drawn is the work area that currently applies, the same one that align and distribute use, whether its values come from the presentation, the team, yourself or the factory. The same button takes the objects away again, and a second click no longer doubles them. This replaces the old "create guides" button under Master Settings, which drew four more objects on every click and had no way back. Free to use. created 04/09/2026
FIX Work area & grid: rows with no effect. The axis choice silences an entire side - with "vertical only" the preview quietly dropped every entry for rows, horizontal gutter and horizontal step. Anyone starting from the factory preset "12 columns" ran straight into it: it is set to "vertical only", and the row count next to it looked as if it applied. The silenced side is now greyed out; the values stay put and apply again as soon as "both" is chosen. Also fixed: Switching the frame to "slide" only revealed the four own margins after the next change. created 04/09/2026
CHG The layout tools are now called "Object tools", and the work area has moved out of them. The reason is what a tool touches: multiplying and resizing act on the selection, whereas margins, guides and grids set up the surface and need no selection at all. Two panes, two buttons in the Tools group - "Object tools" with the Multiplier and Resizer tabs, "Work area" with the work area and the grid. Nothing was lost in the move; the tabs are where they were, only in the pane they belong to. created 04/09/2026
NEW Work area & grid: a grid generator in the "Grid" tab. Instead of dragging guides one by one, you can now lay down a whole grid. Two kinds are on offer: divide the frame into columns and rows with gutters between them, or set guides at a fixed step from an origin - the start of the frame, the centre of the frame or the centre of the slide, where a chain that starts from a centre runs out to both sides. The frame is either the work area or the slide with margins of its own, and lengths can be entered in centimetres, points or per cent. Besides the frame, the columns, the rows and the gutters there are centre axes, thirds and the golden ratio. Each kind of line can take a colour of its own - frame edges, column and row edges, gutter centres and the helper divisions - which is what keeps 35 vertical guides apart. A preview shows the grid before anything is written, along with how many guides there will be, how large the frame is and how wide a column becomes; warnings appear in red. Settings can be kept as presets, which come from the factory, from the team or from you. The guides go to the presentation, to the master, to the current slide's layout or to every layout, either replacing what is there or adding to it. Removing them has a reach of its own, up to "everywhere", and is free to use just like showing and hiding; laying down a grid is part of Pro. One thing worth knowing: PowerPoint does not bring removed guides back with Ctrl+Z, which is why "everywhere" asks first. created 04/09/2026
NEW Work area & grid: a pane of its own. The new "Work area" button opens a docked pane for the surface everything else works on - it changes no content and needs no selection. Guides can be shown and hidden there without a keyboard shortcut, and the pane counts how many guides lie on the presentation, on the master and on the current slide's layout: the normal view stacks these three levels, which is why a line sometimes seems to come out of nowhere. It also names the work area that currently applies, together with where its values come from - presentation, team, your own setting or factory - and lists the four margins in centimetres. New as well: the values can be entered right there, one row per margin, clockwise from the top, and they can be saved either for this presentation or for you in every presentation. Setting all four to zero removes the work area again, and the next level down takes over. That replaces the old route through the task pane under Master Settings; existing presentations are read unchanged. created 04/09/2026

Add-in 2.3 – Work area & Grid Manager 2.3.0.0 06/09/2026

NEW The work area and the grid now have a docked pane of their own. Open it with the new “Work area” button and everything that keeps a deck tidy lives in one place. In the “Work area” tab you set the margins — paired by axis (left/right, top/bottom), measured from the slide edge or from the centre — and see the slide size and the remaining usable area in centimetres. In the “Grid” tab a grid generator lays down evenly divided lines or a fixed step in one go, instead of dragging guides one by one; you can also keep a list of single lines, each with its own description. Both the margins and the grids can be saved as templates and, with one click, written into every open presentation at once. Two buttons draw the work area or the grid straight onto the slide as guides, another removes just the current grid’s guides while leaving the rest. Colours are now their own section — axes, grid lines and single lines can each be coloured separately. Along the way a handful of fixes: the work area now arrives correctly when a file is opened (align, distribute and the puzzle read it again), the drawn work area is blue instead of red, and setting the work area happens in one place only. Part of the tools; templates and multi-deck writing are Pro. created 06/09/2026

Add-in 2.2.1.0 30/08/2026

NEW Objects created from a snippet with parameters can now be edited straight on the slide — right-click or ribbon. Until now you had to delete such an object and insert it again from the library whenever a number, a colour or a piece of text was no longer right. The object now remembers which snippet it came from and which settings produced it. Right-clicking it offers “Edit object”, and the same button sits in the ribbon under Tools. The familiar settings dialog opens with exactly the values used back then; after “Update” the new object sits in the same place, at the same size, rotation and stacking order, and under the same name as the old one. The program code does not travel inside the presentation: only the identity of the snippet is stored, and the code is fetched afresh from your own or the online library when you edit. Anyone who does not have the snippet sees a message naming it — and the object on the slide is left untouched. This feature is part of the Pro licence. created 29/08/2026

Add-in 2.2.0.0 30/08/2026

FIX Reference object: the choice saved in the presentation was quietly discarded when the file was opened. The task pane went on showing it — „Slide“ or „Work area“ — but align, distribute and match size all worked from „Last object“ regardless. No error, no message, just the wrong result. The ribbon buttons showed the wrong one as pressed for the same reason. Whether it went wrong at all depended on whether PowerPoint was started with a file or empty, which is why it could go unnoticed for so long. The saved choice is now kept. created 30/08/2026
FIX The add-in no longer started: after launching PowerPoint the PPPTools tab was missing from the ribbon, the task panes stayed empty, and nothing in the add-in could be reached. The cause was a single invalid attribute on a separator line in the right-click menus. PowerPoint checks the whole ribbon in one go and throws all of it away over one mistake — without a message. The separator is gone and the tab is back. So that this can never pass unnoticed again, the add-in now writes a start-up log to %AppData%\PPPTools\startup_log.txt: it records every start-up step and, if anything goes wrong, names it. Should the add-in ever fail to appear, that file is what to send along. created 29/08/2026
FIX Eleven texts sent you down a route that no longer exists. Messages and tooltips still pointed to „Task pane → ≡ → Settings“ for the API keys, the licence upgrade and the library upload key — a way in that fell away when the settings moved into a task pane of their own. Several of them also named a page „Library Upload“ that never existed; it is called „Online library“. All eleven now name the real route. created 29/08/2026
LNG One tool, one name: the word cloud generator is called Wordcloud everywhere now, in both languages — the English texts had been drifting between „Word cloud“, „Word Cloud“ and „word cloud“. A glossary of twelve product terms is checked before every release, so the names can no longer come apart. created 29/08/2026
FIX Project plan: with captions set to follow the output language, the status line still wrote its caption in German on an English plan. It was the one caption that had been left reading the interface language instead of the plan's. created 29/08/2026
CHG Slide text now follows an output language of its own, separate from the language you operate the add-in in. Under Settings → Language there are two new choices: one for all decks, one that applies to the open deck alone and travels inside the file. Agenda, Wordcloud, Puzzle and the project plan write their generated text in that language — month, quarter and week names, durations, the status-line caption, the info line under a cloud including its date format, the agenda screen tips and the sample deck. Slides already generated stay exactly as they are. The project plan may also step out of line: the „Captions“ field in the Period tab holds it to German or English regardless. Existing plans keep the language they had. created 29/08/2026
NEW “About & version”: a full-text search below the filter buttons searches the change log. It works after the version filter and the kind filter and cuts away single lines. If the heading of an entry matches (area, version, date), the whole entry stays — typing “2.0.4” means the release, not one line inside it. Matches are highlighted in yellow — in the heading as well as in the lines below. created 29/08/2026
CHG The change log under “About & version” now appears in the add-in language set. When fetching the feed, the add-in tells the server which language it speaks; where a translation is missing, the English version stands there in place of an empty line. The tags NEW, FIX, CHG and LNG stay the same in every language. The texts come from the server, so a translation supplied later appears with no new installation. created 29/08/2026
LNG Groundwork for multilingualism: choice lists now remember a fixed value rather than the label displayed. This becomes visible in the puzzle tool (mode, edge style, colour palette) — saved puzzles and templates stay valid even once the labels are translated later. With your own snippets, value and label can now be separated in "@param enum": options="single=Single|double=Double" displays "Single"/"Double" but gives the script "single"/"double" — so the label can be translated without breaking the script. With no equals sign everything stays as before, and existing snippets go on running unchanged. In addition the filter chips in the Content Manager no longer label themselves from the internal key. created 26/08/2026
LNG The "Layout tools" task pane (Multiplier and Resizer) now speaks both languages: every label, hint, status message and preview text now comes from the language files rather than fixed in the program. In German not a word changes — in English the pane is complete for the first time. Switch in the settings under Language, effective after a restart of PowerPoint. created 26/08/2026
LNG The "Puzzle" task pane now speaks both languages: every label, hint, preview text and message now comes from the language files rather than fixed in the program. In German not a word changes — in English the pane is complete for the first time. In addition the choice lists for mode, edge shape, frame and piece ratio, scatter area and gradient now remember a fixed value rather than the label displayed — saved puzzles and presets stay valid unchanged. Switch in the settings under Language, effective after a restart of PowerPoint. created 26/08/2026
FIX Puzzle: the colour palette chosen jumped back to "Theme colours" as soon as the palette list was refreshed — after editing a palette in the colour palettes task pane, for instance. The choice is now kept. created 26/08/2026
LNG Six further task panes now speak both languages: QR code, word cloud, Venn diagram, presentation formatting, export and personalise/replace. Every label, hint, choice list, preview and status message now comes from the language files rather than fixed in the program — in German not a word changes, and in English the panes are complete for the first time. With personalise this holds for the entries of the "Find" and "Do" lists together with their entry fields as well. The word cloud now remembers shape, alignment and gradient as a fixed value rather than as the label displayed — saved presets stay valid unchanged. Switch in the settings under Language, effective after a restart of PowerPoint. created 26/08/2026
FIX Word cloud: the colour palette chosen jumped back to the first entry as soon as the palette list was refreshed — after editing a palette in the colour palettes task pane, for instance. The choice is now kept. created 26/08/2026
LNG Three further areas now speak both languages: the project plan generator, the agenda assistant together with its template designer, and the four format dialogs (colour picker, fill, border, font). Every label, hint, choice list and message now comes from the language files rather than fixed in the program — in German not a word changes, and in English they are complete for the first time. In the format dialogs this covers the plain-language names of the design colour slots, the colour gradations, the dash and arrow types and the patterns and textures as well; they now follow a change of language instead of staying in the language that applied at start-up. Along the way the German messages in the project plan and the agenda have been brought into line with Swiss orthography. Switch in the settings under Language, effective after a restart of PowerPoint. created 27/08/2026
LNG The ribbon now speaks both languages — and with it every message it triggers: save confirmations, name conflicts, free-limit notices, the translation feedback and the admin PIN dialogs. Likewise the titles of all fourteen task panes together with their error messages, which until now showed in German even in English PowerPoint. Two warnings about the reference object were, conversely, in English even in German — that has been put right too. In German not a word changes; in English the ribbon is consistent for the first time. created 27/08/2026
LNG The Content Manager and the Advanced Content Editor now speak both languages: Manage, bulk editing, settings, the admin area and the complete Advanced Content Editor with its toolbar, menus, messages and analysis report. created 27/08/2026
LNG Dates now follow the interface language: footers, the project plan, QR appointments and the licence and sync displays show the date in the notation of the chosen language. Entry fields still understand both notations, and a Swiss Windows setting is preserved. created 27/08/2026
LNG The licence overview on the website is now available in English as well; the upgrade link in the add-in leads automatically to the matching language version. created 27/08/2026
NEW It can now be set separately which language tools use to write text ONTO THE SLIDE — default titles, example texts, captions, jump-mark notes. Until now that followed the interface language; anyone using the add-in in English got English slide texts. The default remains "as the interface", but it can be fixed to German or English — and overridden per deck on top of that. This note is stored in the deck itself and travels with the file. Slides already created are unaffected. It takes effect in the agenda (titles, jump marks, sample and example slides), the word cloud (the information line together with the date format) and the puzzle. created 27/08/2026
LNG Three further areas now speak both languages: "Remove notes & comments", the backup pane together with its category names, its log and the overview in the ZIP, and the Save dialog shared by the snippet, slide, text and action managers. created 27/08/2026
LNG Click a locked button and the licence tab now names the tool in the language set — previously the German name always stood there. created 27/08/2026
LNG The agenda generator now speaks in the language set — status lines, messages in the slide master and the texts of the sample slides. What is written onto the slide (the total line, durations, sub-items) follows the language of the deck. created 27/08/2026
LNG The project plan now writes its texts from the language files rather than from the program code — bar durations, the week abbreviations of the time axis and the alternative text of the graphic. The wording is unchanged; the language still follows the switch in the project plan itself. created 28/08/2026
LNG Venn diagrams, the emoji picker, the colour palettes and personalise now take their last texts from the language files rather than from the program code: the note about the daily limit, the messages of the Venn renderer, the style names of the emoji picker and the suggested names for new palettes and profiles. The example texts of a Venn diagram now follow the language of the deck — a German deck gets German examples. created 28/08/2026
CHG Central settings panel: every PPPTools setting now sits in a single task pane — PPPTools ribbon, group "About", button "Settings". On the left is a navigation bar with 14 pages in five groups (PPPTools, Library, Services, Appearance, Administration), and above it a search box that searches labels and keywords. It contains About & version, Licence, General (language and usage data), Storage locations, Sync, Backup & restore, View, API keys, Translate, Copilot & optimise, Colours, and the three administration pages. The old routes there have gone: the separate backup button in the ribbon and the settings tabs in the Content Manager — the value lists have moved into the latter's burger menu instead. The change log on "About & version" can now be narrowed down by version and type: all the filter buttons are grey, a click colours them orange, and the "All" button lifts the selection again. In the "Library" group there is also a signpost "Value lists" with an arrow: it is not a page but opens the Content Manager, where the value lists now live — and the settings stay as they were. Each of the 14 pages has a help page of its own behind the question mark. created 28/08/2026

Add-in 2.2.1 – Redefine code snippets 2.2.1.0 30/08/2026

NEW Objects you built from a parametrised snippet — Harvey balls, QR codes, Venn diagrams, project plans and the like — can now be edited right on the slide. Right-click the object (or use the ribbon under Tools) and the original settings dialog reopens with exactly the values you used back then, prefilled. After “Update” the object is redrawn in place — same position, size, rotation, stacking order and name. No more deleting and re-inserting from the library just to change a number, a colour or a label. The snippet code never travels inside the presentation: only the snippet's identity is stored, and the code is fetched afresh from your own or the online library when you edit. Anyone who doesn't have the snippet sees a message naming it, and the object is left untouched. Part of the Pro licence. created 30/08/2026

Add-in 2.2.0 – Multilanguage & central settings 2.2.0.0 30/08/2026

NEW PPPTools now speaks German and English throughout. After the first step in 2.1.0 (ribbon + settings), every task pane now follows suit — Layout, Puzzle, QR code, Word cloud, Venn, Project plan, Agenda, format dialogs, Content Manager and many more — together with all their messages. Dates and the licence website follow the chosen language too. Switch it under Settings → Add-in language: Automatic (follows Windows), German or English. The ribbon changes at once; drop-down lists and task panes follow after a restart of PowerPoint. created 30/08/2026
NEW You can now set separately which language tools use for the text they write onto the slide — default titles, sample texts, captions, jump-mark hints. So you can operate the add-in in English yet still build German slides (or the other way round). It can be set as a general default and, as an exception, per individual deck. created 30/08/2026
CHG All of PPPTools' settings now live in a single task pane: ribbon PPPTools → group “About” → “Settings”. A navigation bar on the left leads to 14 pages, with a search across them and an “About & version” section that adds a full-text search of the changelog. The entry points that used to be scattered across the add-in are now brought together in one place. created 30/08/2026

Website 1.4.288 29/08/2026

FIX Feature overview: the badge on the Pro card showed an internal object name instead of “Most popular”. created 29/08/2026
CHG Download page: the change log used to be repeated there in full length. It now lives only on “What is new & every version” — with filters and search — and the download page simply links to it. created 29/08/2026
FIX Redirects built their address as http:// instead of https:// and sent the browser through plain text once. created 29/08/2026
CHG The English site now has English addresses: /en/pricing and /en/features. The German words redirect there, and the language switch translates the address along with it. created 29/08/2026

Website 1.4.287 29/08/2026

LNG The public website is completely bilingual. All ten pages — landing page, features, pricing, browse, item detail, download, change log, contact, status and terms — now carry their text in both German and English, and the EN/DE switch keeps you on the page you are reading. The page texts sit in the templates themselves, so a correction to the wording is live without a container restart. created 29/08/2026
NEW The change log has a filter bar: by area (add-in, online help, library & website), by version (grouped per area), by kind (NEW, FIX, CHG, LNG — several at once, with counts) and a full-text search that highlights what it finds. A hit counter and a reset link sit underneath. The filters work in the browser, so nothing is reloaded and nothing is sent anywhere. created 29/08/2026
FIX Three faults found while translating. Addresses with a trailing slash (/browse/, /download/, /changelog/ …) returned an error page — they now redirect. /funktionen and /lizenzen did not exist as German addresses at all; now they do. And the instructions for the code-signing certificate were never shown on the download page, because of a wrong condition — visible again, and in English on the English page. created 29/08/2026

Online help 1.0.264 29/08/2026

FIX The version number of the online help carried an invisible control character. It came from the file the version is kept in and reached as far as the component overview of the library server. Fixed — the file is written without that character from now on, and reading it strips one out as well, should it ever return. created 29/08/2026

Library 1.4.286 29/08/2026

LNG The change log is multilingual. The version, the date and the kind still stand in appcast.json and whatsnew.json — but the text of every line now lives per language in a file of its own (changelog/en.json, changelog/de.json), joined by a fixed id that a line keeps for its whole life. English is the leading language, exactly as in the add-in: where a translation is missing, the English version appears in place of an empty line. The tags NEW, FIX, CHG and LNG are deliberately not translated. The public page is now available at /de/changelog and /en/changelog; /api/v1/whatsnew and /api/v1/appversion take a lang parameter for it and, with none given, deliver German unchanged — so older builds of the add-in go on running untouched. The language files are read at request time, so a translation supplied later is visible with no restart. All 338 existing change log texts have been translated into English. created 29/08/2026

Online help 1.0.263 29/08/2026

LNG Help “About & version”: a new section “The language of the log” — the change log follows the add-in language set, the texts come from the server (a translation supplied later needs no new installation), English is the leading language and the fallback, and the tags NEW, FIX, CHG and LNG stay the same in every language. created 29/08/2026

Online help 1.0.262 29/08/2026

FIX Dead links in the help repaired: 120 cross-references (above all between the settings pages) ended on an error page, because the address was written with ".md". The Venn table on the overview page still pointed at four pages long since absorbed into "Creating a Venn diagram" — it now jumps straight to the matching sections. Alongside those, a wrong language link on the English Text Manager page, a missing picture and a reference into nothing. A check before every publication keeps links, anchors and pictures clean from now on. created 29/08/2026

Add-in 2.1.0.0 25/08/2026

NEW Project plan: dependent tasks move along. Change a date in the task pane, or drag a bar on the slide and then use "Read from slide", and its successors are automatically shifted by the same number of days — start and end together, so the duration and the gap you set yourself are preserved. This works both ways: pull a task forward or shorten it, and the rest of the chain moves forward too. Where a task depends on several shifted predecessors, the most cautious shift wins, and the task is moved exactly once. The status line says what happened, and the "Undo move along" button reverses precisely that shift — anything you typed yourself stays put. The "Move dependent tasks along" switch is new, sits below the task list and is switched on; it works independently of whether the dependency arrows are drawn. created 25/08/2026
FIX Project plan: after "Read from slide" the dependency arrows pointed at the wrong task whenever dragging the bars had changed the order of the rows. Predecessors are stored as numbers, and those numbers were not carried along when the rows were re-sorted. They are now kept in step. created 25/08/2026
LNG The add-in now speaks German and English. Under "Settings" there is a "Add-in language" choice: Automatic (follows Windows), German or English. The ribbon switches immediately; drop-down lists and task panes follow after a restart of PowerPoint. Until now the ribbon was labelled entirely in English while the task panes were German — that mixture is gone. The help buttons now open the page in the selected language as well. This step covers the ribbon and the setting itself; the remaining task panes follow in the next versions. created 25/08/2026
FIX The info area on the right of the ribbon permanently showed "Version 1.2.0.0" — a hard-coded number, long out of date, regardless of which build was actually installed. The number is now determined when it is displayed and stays current by itself after every update. created 25/08/2026
NEW Project plan: task numbers on the slide. The new "Show task numbers" switch in the Tasks section puts each task's number from the list in front of it — exactly the number you enter under "Predecessors". In the table this creates a narrow column of its own to the left of the title, with its own heading ("No." by default); in the "blocks only" layout the number precedes the title inside the block, or sits next to the diamond. That makes it possible to talk through a printed or projected plan without tracing the dependency arrows with a finger. If the text column is too narrow for a number column, the numbers are omitted and the status line says so. created 25/08/2026
NEW Project plan: alternative text for the plan group. Every generated plan is automatically given a description covering the period, the number of tasks and milestones, the state of the work and the top outline level. Until now a screen reader read out nothing but "Group" at this point. The text is written in the plan language you selected (German or English) and is rewritten on every update. created 25/08/2026
NEW Project plan: remove a plan from the slide. The "On this slide" bar now carries a "Remove" button next to "Load". After a confirmation it deletes every shape of the selected plan together with the settings stored for it in the document. Doing this by hand easily left remnants behind, which reappeared at the next "Update". Whatever is set in the task pane is kept — "Create new" turns it back into a plan. created 25/08/2026
FIX Project plan: when a slide holding a plan was duplicated, the original and the copy shared a single set of settings. Changing the copy and updating it silently overwrote the settings of the original; updating the original later then drew the copy. The plan you are working on is now made independent automatically at the first update — the other version stays untouched, and the status line says what happened. created 25/08/2026

Add-in 2.1.0 – project plan enhancements 2.1.0.0 25/08/2026

NEW Project plan: dependent tasks are brought along automatically. Move a date in the task pane, or drag a bar on the slide and read it back afterwards, and the successors move along by the same number of days — the duration and the gap you set yourself are preserved. This works in both directions. The new "Move dependent tasks along" switch sits below the task list and is switched on; "Undo move along" reverses precisely that shift. created 25/08/2026
NEW Project plan: task numbers on the slide. The "Show task numbers" switch puts each task's list number in front of it — the same number entered under "Predecessors". This makes it possible to talk through a printed plan without tracing the dependency arrows with a finger. created 25/08/2026
NEW Project plan: "Remove plan" deletes every shape of a plan, together with the settings stored for it in the document, cleanly from the slide after a confirmation — with no remnants that reappear at the next update. created 25/08/2026
LNG The add-in now speaks German and English. Under "Settings → Add-in language" you choose Automatic (follows Windows), German or English. The ribbon switches immediately, and choice lists and task panes after a restart. The previous mixture of languages (an English ribbon, German panes) is thereby gone. created 25/08/2026

Add-in 2.0.5.0 23/08/2026

FIX Help in the puzzle tool in the right language: the question-mark button in the "Puzzle" task pane always opened the German help page, even when PowerPoint runs in English. Like every other help button, it now follows the interface language you selected. created 21/08/2026
CHG Colour palettes (ribbon "PPPTools", group "Tools"): the task pane now opens the "Apply" tab at the same width as Puzzle, Word cloud, Venn or QR code. It used to be narrower, so the task pane jumped in width when switching between tools. The "Manage" tab keeps its double width, so that the list and the editor have room side by side. created 22/08/2026
CHG Colour palettes, "Manage" tab: "Export…" now sits below the palette list, right next to "Import…". It used to be further to the right by the editor, even though the two belong together. Below the list you therefore find "New" and "Duplicate" in the first row and "Import…" and "Export…" in the second. created 22/08/2026
NEW Quotations and proverbs from the online library: with online mode active, the Text Manager shows curated text snippets in German, English and French — sorted by topic and ready to insert, with no need to download them first. created 22/08/2026
NEW Quotations in the Text Manager: the tile now shows the wording itself — for quotations in italics inside quotation marks, with the author below. The "Quotations only" box boils the list down, and the "Quotation: yes / no" switch sits in the "Manage" tab. A right-click on a snippet offers "Insert as quotation block": a text box of its own, quotation marks matching the snippet's language, the name right-aligned below — and no name line at all for proverbs. Typeface and colour come from the slide design. created 23/08/2026
FIX Multi-line quotations in the Text Manager: when inserting as a quotation block, every line of the wording after the first used to be set like the author line — small and right-aligned — while the author himself stayed large. The wording now remains a single paragraph, however many lines it runs to, and only the name line below it is set smaller. created 23/08/2026

Add-in 2.0.5 – quotations & proverbs 2.0.5.0 23/08/2026

NEW Quotations and proverbs from the online library: in online mode the Text Manager now shows curated text snippets in German, English and French — sorted by topic and ready to insert into the slide, with no need to download them first. Ideal for the apt opening or the fitting closing word. created 23/08/2026
NEW Quotations now look like quotations: the tile shows the wording itself — for quotations in italics inside quotation marks, with the author below. The "Quotations only" box boils the list down to quotations. And a right-click on a snippet offers "Insert as quotation block": a text box of its own, quotation marks matching the snippet's language and the name line right below it — the look comes from your slide design. created 23/08/2026
FIX Multi-line quotations are now set correctly when inserted as a quotation block: the wording remains a single connected paragraph, however many lines it runs to, and only the name line below it is set smaller and right-aligned. created 23/08/2026

Library 1.4.262 23/08/2026

FIX Proverbs stood there with an author line naming nothing but the genre — "Sprichwort", "Proverb", "Proverbe". That line has gone: a proverb now appears as pure wording, the way it was meant to. Where the origin really does say something — "Japanese proverb", say — it stays. created 23/08/2026

Online help 1.0.251 23/08/2026

CHG Text Manager: a new section "Quotations and proverbs" — quotation marks by language, the "Quotation: yes / no" switch, the "Quotations only" box and inserting a finished quotation block. The "Quotations & proverbs" page points to it. created 23/08/2026

Library 1.4.258 23/08/2026

NEW Quotations can be recognised as quotations: flagged text snippets appear in the library as a quotation block — the wording in the quotation marks of its language, the author as a line of its own below it. With proverbs the name line falls away. A filter shows only quotations if you wish. created 23/08/2026

Library 1.4.256 22/08/2026

NEW Curated quotations & proverbs: the online library contains 186 text snippets in German, English and French — from Seneca to "Rome wasn't built in a day", sorted by topic and usable with no download. created 22/08/2026

Online help 1.0.250 22/08/2026

NEW New help page "Quotations & proverbs": where the curated collection comes from, how it appears in the Text Manager, which languages there are and why it is in the public domain. created 22/08/2026

Website 1.4.255 22/08/2026

NEW Text snippets on the website: the library now shows quotations, proverbs and standard wordings publicly as well — with a type filter of their own in the catalogue and the wording right on the tile and on the detail page in place of a preview picture. The search finds texts by their wording too. created 22/08/2026
CHG Text snippets need no download: on their detail page, in place of the ZIP button, stands the note that they appear in the add-in directly in the Text Manager. created 22/08/2026

Add-in 2.0.4.0 21/08/2026

NEW Manage your own colour palettes: the new Tools > Colour palettes, "Manage" tab lets you change every colour palette the tools offer — Word cloud, Puzzle, Colour swatches, Venn, Multiply and the colour picker all draw on the same list. Create your own palettes and gradients, add colours, reorder or remove them, rename palettes and hide the ones you do not need — and that expressly includes the ones we ship: your company's house colours can now sit where our default used to be. You cannot break anything in the process. If you change a palette we shipped, the delivered state is not overwritten but merely covered up; a click on "Reset to factory" brings it back at any time. Colours can be picked up from selected objects or pasted as a hex list from a style guide, and instead of fixed colour values you may also use design references such as "Accent 1, 40 % lighter" — palettes like that travel along when the deck changes its design. Renaming a palette does not cost you your saved presets: the old name is kept as an alias, so existing presets still find it. Palettes can be exported and imported individually, and in admin mode published for the whole team as well; your own palettes travel along in the backup. A search box above the list finds a palette by name — even typed without umlauts ("grun" finds "Grüntöne") and even under a name given to it earlier. Changes take effect at once: create, rename, hide or reset a palette and you see it straight away in the open task panes — Word cloud, Puzzle, Colour swatches, Layout and Venn refill their own drop-down lists, with no restart of PowerPoint needed. Free. created 20/08/2026
CHG Colour swatches and colour palettes now sit together: the Colour palettes task pane has two tabs. "Apply" shows the colour squares of the selected palette, for colouring selected objects or inserting them onto the slide as swatches; "Manage" holds the complete palette manager. The pane adapts its width to the tab — narrow for applying, wide for managing. In the ribbon a single button leads there: "Colour swatches" becomes "Colour palettes", and a second entry plus the formerly separate dialog window are gone. A newly created or renamed palette appears immediately in the drop-down next to it and in all the other tools, without restarting PowerPoint. created 21/08/2026
NEW Colouring several properties at once: in the "Apply" tab of the colour palettes pane, three boxes — Fill, Border, Text — now decide what a click on a colour square sets. Previously only one of the three could be chosen; now they combine freely, and one click colours fill and text together, for example. Each property is set on its own: a picture without a fill no longer prevents the border and the type from taking the colour anyway. created 21/08/2026

Add-in 2.0.4 – manage your own colour palettes 2.0.4.0 21/08/2026

NEW The colour palettes now belong to you: under Tools > Colour palettes, "Manage" tab, you change every palette the tools offer — word cloud, puzzle, colour swatches, Venn, multiply and the colour picker all draw on the same list. Create your own palettes and gradients, add colours, reorder, rename or hide them — and that goes for the ones we ship too: your house colours can now sit where our default used to be. You cannot break anything — a click on "Reset to factory" brings the delivered state back at any time. Colours can be taken over from selected objects or pasted as a hex list, and design references such as "Accent 1, 40 % lighter" travel along when the deck changes its design. created 21/08/2026
CHG Colour swatches and colour palettes now sit together: the "Colour palettes" task pane has two tabs — "Apply" for colouring selected objects or inserting the swatches onto the slide, and "Manage" with the complete palette manager. In the ribbon a single button leads there: "Colour swatches" becomes "Colour palettes", and the formerly separate dialog window falls away. created 21/08/2026
NEW Colouring several properties at once: in the "Apply" tab, three boxes — Fill, Border, Text — determine what a click on a colour square sets. They combine freely, so one click colours fill and text together, for instance; each property is set on its own. created 21/08/2026

Add-in 2.0.3.0 20/08/2026

FIX Snippets: the time limit now counts computing time only. Ever since a snippet could ask for a colour, typeface, border or fill in mid-run, the time spent waiting in front of such a dialog counted as running time — a loop over several shapes therefore ran into the time limit even though the script itself had computed for seconds. In the snippet gallery, where the limit is 30 seconds, a single considered dialog was enough. The clock now stands still while such a dialog is open: you can take as long as you like to answer, and the limit still bites where it is meant to — on a script that has miscalculated and never comes back. This applies in the Advanced Content Editor (5 minutes) as well as in the gallery (30 seconds); the abort message now says "computing time" explicitly. created 20/08/2026
FIX Advanced Content Editor: when a script is aborted, the message is now correct. For the time limit it used to say "30 seconds" — a figure left behind when the limit was raised to 5 minutes; the limit and the message now come from the same source and can no longer drift apart. The editor also reported a time limit when the run had been cancelled by hand from the progress display — a cancellation you triggered yourself is now reported as such. The help page "Advanced Content Editor" now states the 5-minute time limit explicitly. created 20/08/2026
FIX Help: in the code examples for the Advanced Content Editor, text alignment was written with the prefix "PowerPoint.". Copying such an example produced the error "CS0103: The name 'PowerPoint' does not exist in the current context" when it ran — because inside a snippet the PowerPoint namespace is already imported and there is no "PowerPoint" alias. The correct form is PpParagraphAlignment.ppAlignCenter without a prefix. Every affected place has been corrected on the pages "Advanced Content Editor", "Example: arrow with adjustments" and "PPPTools reference", in German and English. Those pages now also state the rule "enums without the PowerPoint. prefix", together with the list of namespaces available to a snippet without a using of its own. created 20/08/2026
NEW Advanced Content Editor (ribbon "PPPTools", group "Tools"): a snippet can now ask for a colour, a typeface, a border or a fill in mid-run — using the same format dialogs the ribbon opens. Until now it could only ask before the run (through the @param lines), which meant it had to be settled in advance what there was to ask about at all. A snippet can now compute first and ask afterwards — per shape found, per group, or depending on an intermediate result. The commands are ppptools.AskColor, ppptools.AskRgb, ppptools.AskFont, ppptools.AskLine and ppptools.AskFill; if the dialog is cancelled nothing comes back, and the snippet decides for itself how to carry on. The answer is written with ppptools.ApplyColor, ApplyFont, ApplyLine or ApplyFill. One point matters here: a colour chosen from the design colours keeps its reference to the template this way ("Accent 1, 40 % lighter", say) and is not frozen into a fixed colour value — unlike @param color, where nothing but a finished colour value arrives at the parameter boundary. While such a dialog is open the progress display steps aside and returns afterwards where it left off. This is described in the help under "Advanced Content Editor", section "Opening format dialogs from inside a snippet". The Advanced Content Editor is a Pro-tier tool. created 19/08/2026
CHG Every number field in the PPPTools task panes now has up and down arrows. The format dialogs (colour, font, border, fill) already had them; outside those, every number field was a bare text box, and eight tools each brought their own copy of the same helper — eight opportunities to treat commas and full stops, limits and mistyped input a little differently. They all use the same construction now. Affected are: Venn diagram, Puzzle, Project plan, Layout pane ("Multiply" and "Size" tabs), Format pane (watermark), Personalise (slide section), QR code (size) and Word cloud. Each field now knows its permitted range and a step size that suits the value — half centimetres for measurements, steps of 5 for transparency, 0.25 for line weights, 1 for counts. A value outside the limits is nudged to the nearest permitted number when you leave the field, instead of being silently replaced by a default; comma and full stop count equally as the decimal separator everywhere; the tooltip names the range and the step size. Two fields in the project plan deliberately keep an empty state, because "empty" says something there that no number can: the font size of the legend (empty = same as the tasks) and the lane of a task (empty = the plan picks one itself). The first arrow click out of the empty state sets the smallest permitted value. One thing has changed in behaviour: the live previews now recalculate as soon as an entry is complete — Enter, leaving the field or an arrow click — and no longer on every single keystroke. A half-typed number therefore no longer triggers an interim preview. Available in every licence tier. created 18/08/2026
CHG Venn diagram, "Format" tab (ribbon "PPPTools", button "Venn"): a colour chosen from the design colours now keeps its reference to the template instead of being frozen into a fixed colour value when it is picked. Until now the Venn model stored every colour as a number — a design colour such as "Accent 1, Lighter 40 %" chosen in the colour picker therefore ended up in the diagram as a fixed value and stayed put when the deck changed its design. What is stored now is the colour slot itself, and the renderer writes it to the slide that way too: when the deck changes its design, fill, line and font colour move along, exactly as they do for a shape coloured by hand from the design colours — with no need to regenerate the diagram. This holds in both format modes, survives saving a template of your own, and survives "Take settings from the selected diagram". The colour field in the panel says in its tooltip what is stored there: either a hex value or a design slot with the note "follows the template". The "Deck colours" colour scheme now assigns the accent colours as references too, no longer as values read off. Fixed values remain where there can be no colour slot: for mixed intersection areas (the blend of two base colours is not a design slot), for the gradient schemes, and for the five built-in templates, which deliberately carry fixed colours. Older files are read unchanged, and a diagram without a readable design falls back on the colour value last computed. Available in every licence tier. created 18/08/2026
CHG The PPPTools colour palettes now understand a reference to the template. Until now a palette was a list of fixed colour values, and the four entries derived from the slide design — "Template colours (active design)", "Template accent, single colour", "Accent colour + grey (highlight the top one)" and "Gradient: template accents" — were therefore not proper palettes at all but special cases that every tool worked out for itself. That is why they could only be chosen where that special case had been built in: in the Word cloud, in Puzzle through its own "Theme colours" mode, and in Colour swatches through the entry "Design accent colours". They were missing entirely from Multiply shape, from the Venn colour schemes and from the palette group of the colour picker. A palette slot may now mean a place in the colour scheme instead of a fixed colour value, optionally lightened or darkened — in exactly the notation a design colour clicked in the colour picker already stores. This has turned the four entries into ordinary palettes, and they are now available everywhere palettes are: Word cloud, Puzzle, Colour swatches, Multiply shape, Venn and the colour picker. A palette may mix the two — "Accent colour + grey" consists of one design reference and five fixed shades of grey. The difference becomes visible in the colour picker: click a palette field that means the template and the reference is kept instead of being frozen into a fixed value, and the tooltip says "follows the template" rather than "fixed colour". Should the presentation change its design later, this colour moves along. The rebuild has one visible side effect: "Template accent, single colour" now computes its six brightness steps the way Office itself lightens and darkens, no longer through a calculation of the Word cloud's own. The palette therefore looks somewhat different than before — namely exactly like the "Accent 1" column in the colour picker. Slides already generated do not change; the colours are only recalculated the next time they are generated. Available in every licence tier. created 18/08/2026
FIX Every PPPTools dialog now adapts its height to what is inside it. The window size used to be determined once when the dialog opened and stayed fixed after that: if the content grew afterwards — because a note ran to two lines, say, or the fill switched from solid colour to gradient and unfolded a whole bar for it — the "Apply" and "Cancel" buttons slid out of the bottom of the window. Since these dialogs cannot be dragged larger at the edge and there was no scroll bar either, there was nothing to be done at that point but cancel. They now grow along as soon as it becomes necessary — downwards only, and never back again, so that the window does not jump at every click that shortens the text once more. If the screen is not big enough the dialog stays on the desktop and is given a scroll bar; if it opens far down at the mouse pointer it moves up far enough to remain fully visible. The fault sat in one shared place and therefore affected every dialog alike — colour, font, border, fill, format, Multiply shape and Remove notes. Available in every licence tier. created 17/08/2026
CHG Format pane, "Find & change" tab, action "Format font" (ribbon "PPPTools", button "Format"): the font dialog behind the "Font…" button now offers its full range there. Until now a rule could only set typeface, size, style (bold, italic, underline, strikethrough) and font colour; the dialog hid the remaining rows at this point, because the rule would not have carried them onto the slide. That restriction is gone. Newly available are: small capitals and all capitals, superscript and subscript, character spacing, and text highlighting — the coloured bar behind the text. A single rule now handles things that previously meant touching every occurrence by hand — subscripting every instance of "CO2" across a whole presentation, say, or giving every year a yellow background. One point matters: what is changed is still only the match, or the piece of text selected by the target switch, not the whole shape — the rest of the paragraph stays untouched. And as everywhere in this tab: rows that are not ticked stay unchanged. Existing saved profiles carry on unchanged, the new attributes are added and stand at "unchanged" there. A note on character spacing: the value 0 is an explicit instruction, namely "undo any existing spacing", and therefore something different from a row left empty. Available in every licence tier. created 17/08/2026
CHG Format pane, "Find & change" tab (ribbon "PPPTools", button "Format"): the actions "Format font" and "Format object" gather their individual fields into dialog buttons. "Format font" used to offer one button for typeface/size/style and a second field beside it just for the font colour; "Format object" had six fields side by side — fill, fill colour, border, border colour, border width and border style. A "Font…" button now opens the full font dialog, and two buttons, "Fill…" and "Border…", open the corresponding dialogs; the button caption sums up what is set, so that a rule stays readable even when collapsed. This lets the rules do more than before: for the border all 9 dash types instead of the previous 6, plus transparency and compound type; for the fill, transparency; for the font, text highlighting as well; and every colour may now carry a reference to the template instead of being nothing but a fixed value. The former drop-downs "unchanged / set / remove" have not disappeared but have been absorbed into the three-state "Visible" switch of the dialogs: indeterminate means unchanged, ticked means set, empty means no fill or no border. Existing saved profiles carry on unchanged — they are read and written with the same keys, and the old short forms of the dash type are still understood. Deliberately not offered: arrowheads (pointless on a shape border) and pattern, texture and picture fills, so that a rule running across hundreds of shapes cannot switch their fill type unnoticed. Available in every licence tier. created 16/08/2026
NEW Wherever PPPTools asks for a colour, a typeface, a border or a fill, dialogs of its own now open instead of the Windows dialogs — in the "Find & change" task pane, in Venn, Word cloud, Puzzle, QR code and Colour swatches, in the parameter dialogs of parameterised snippets and in the admin colour palette. The colour picker unfolds right at the mouse pointer like the menu of a ribbon colour button and brings everything together in one list: the presentation's 10 design colours with 5 shades each, the 10 standard colours, the PPPTools colour palettes to choose from, the colours last used across sessions, an eyedropper that picks up a colour pixel-precisely from the whole screen (with a 10× magnifier under the pointer), and hex entry. More important than the choice is what gets stored: click a design colour and it is not the colour value that is filed away but the place in the colour scheme ("Accent 3, Lighter 60 %", say) — should the presentation change its template later, this colour moves along. Take a standard colour, the eyedropper or hex entry and you get a fixed value; for palette colours the individual field decides. There is deliberately no switch for this, the way you choose decides; below the preview it therefore says in plain words "follows the template" or "stays exactly like this". Above the design-colour matrix there is also a list that starts with "Design of the deck" and offers below it every colour scheme Office ships ("Blue Warm", "Grayscale", "Marquee" and some twenty others, read straight from Office rather than typed out). This lets you see, ahead of a planned template change, how a colour slot looks in another scheme. That is expressly only a preview: the presentation keeps its design, no slide changes, and clicking a colour in a foreign scheme still stores the colour slot — so what appears on the slide is the colour that slot has in your own design. The plain-words line says so at that point. If you really want a foreign shade fixed, take it via hex or the eyedropper. The font dialog shows every font name in its own typeface and offers, in addition to typeface, size and bold/italic/underline/strikethrough, the new small capitals, all capitals, superscript and subscript, character spacing, plus font colour and text highlighting through the full colour picker. When it opens with the state of an existing object it names that object's font correctly even when the shape uses the template's font and PowerPoint keeps only a placeholder internally; if a font is not installed on this machine at all, its name still appears instead of an empty line. Text without highlighting comes back as "no highlighting" rather than as a black bar. The border dialog now knows all 9 dash types (6 before), the compound type (single, thin-thin, thin-thick, thick-thin, thick between thin), transparency, and start and end arrowheads, and shows the result in a preview with a real dash pattern and filled arrowheads. Besides solid colour, the fill dialog now handles gradients with any number of colour stops on a drag bar (each stop with its own colour, position and transparency; linear, radial, rectangular, with an angle), 30 gradient templates computed from the colour scheme plus the curated PPPTools gradients, as well as pattern, texture and picture; the preview sits on a chequerboard, so that semi-transparent fills read as transparent and not merely as "lighter". All three dialogs can also run in change mode: there a tick sits in front of every row, and only what is ticked gets written — so a rule in "Find & change" that is meant to set only the font colour changes neither typeface nor size. For border and fill the three-state "Visible" switch takes on that role: indeterminate means unchanged, ticked means draw, empty means no border or no fill. Two settings from the PowerPoint task pane are deliberately missing, because PowerPoint does not make them available to add-ins: the join type and the cap type of a line, and the "path" gradient type — you still set those three through "Format Shape" in PowerPoint, and the PPPTools dialogs leave them untouched. Available in every licence tier. created 17/08/2026
NEW Settings, "=" menu (burger menu on the far right): new entry "Re-read library". Galleries, Manage and Search read from a cached overview rather than from disk each time they open — objects that reach the library behind the back of PPPTools (copied in by hand, through a sync folder, or put there by someone else) therefore never showed up. The new entry rebuilds that overview by hand: tick the object types individually (snippets, slides, storylines, actions, texts) or set them with "All"/"None", then "Re-read". A progress bar, a status line naming the type currently being read and a log with one line per type appear in the task pane; PowerPoint stays usable throughout. Afterwards galleries, Manage and Search show the new state at once, with no restart. The overview is replaced, not extended — objects deleted outside also disappear; nothing changes about the files themselves. If a type cannot be read, the log says so and its previous state is kept, while the remaining types are still read to the end. Available in every licence tier. created 16/08/2026
CHG Backup (ribbon "PPPTools", button "Backup"): the old embedded entry points are gone. Besides its own ribbon button, Backup could also be reached as an entry in the settings menu and as a sub-tab in the admin view — three routes to the same panel. What remains is the "Backup" ribbon button in the "Tools" group. Nothing changes in what it can do: the "Public" library is still freely selectable in the panel, and no admin view is needed for it. So that the help stays reachable from within the panel, the backup panel now has a header of its own with a title and a "?" button opening the backup help page — just as Word cloud, Emoji and the other stand-alone task panes already do. created 16/08/2026
FIX Backup (ribbon "PPPTools", button "Backup"), "Restore" tab: restored objects did not appear in the galleries or in the Manage area, even though the log reported them as new — every library category was affected (snippets, slides, storylines, actions and texts). The reason was that galleries and Manage read from a cached overview which was not refreshed after the import; since that overview was also loaded by preference at program start, not even a restart helped. PPPTools now re-reads the library immediately after the import — the restored objects are available at once and without a restart, and the log points this out. The note about restarting now appears only where it applies: for restored settings, presets and value lists. created 16/08/2026
CHG Backup (ribbon "PPPTools", button "Backup"), "Back up" and "Restore" tabs: progress and result now appear in the task pane itself instead of in windows of their own. Once the destination has been chosen there is no progress dialog any more; instead the panel shows, below the button, a progress bar, a status line naming the category currently being backed up together with a counter ("Exporting: snippets — 128 / 312", say) and beneath it a log that grows as it goes: one line per category with the number of objects backed up, plus notes about missing files, errors in red and, at the end, the destination path. The closing message with the backup summary is gone as well — its content is in the log and lies unchanged in the ZIP as backup_info.txt and beside it as <backupname>_info.txt. The button is locked while the run is going, and PowerPoint stays usable; if the log grows longer than the task pane, the pane scrolls along and jumps to the end automatically. The "Restore" tab shows progress and log the same way, there with the number of new and skipped objects per category. created 16/08/2026
NEW Text Manager: texts can now be translated automatically and linked to one another as language variants. In the Manage tab every text carries the new "Translate" button for this: it first shows which languages would be translated into — namely every language in the value list for which there is no variant yet — and, once confirmed, creates a text of its own per language, linked to the original. Where a variant for a language already exists, only its content is refreshed instead of a duplicate being created. Optionally this happens as you file the text away: the Save dialog then shows a "Translate" row, which displays right beside it which languages would come into being, and which deliberately stands at "No". This automatic translation has to be enabled once beforehand: the Translate area has a new "Text Manager" section for it, with the switch "Allow automatic translation on save". It is off out of the box and can only be set once a translation engine has been chosen above — because every translation sends the text to an external service and costs one call per language. Without that permission the row does not appear in the Save dialog at all. The "Translate" button in the Manage tab does not need this permission, since it asks every time anyway; if no engine has been set up yet it is greyed out and names the reason as a short note, rather than showing an error only after the click. Translation uses the engine and the API key from the Translate settings (DeepL, Azure, OpenAI, Mistral, Claude or Gemini). The new texts take over category, keywords, audience, description and any stored formatting from the original, and carry the target language in their name. Independently of this, texts can also be linked as language variants by hand — exactly as with snippets — unlinked again, and jumped between; the linked languages appear in the detail area. Linking by hand is included from the free version onwards; automatic translation, like the rest of the translation features, requires a Pro licence. created 16/08/2026
NEW New Text Manager (ribbon "PPPTools", group "Content Manager") — the fifth content manager alongside Snippets, Slides, Storylines and Actions, intended for reusable text blocks such as legal notices, standard wordings, quotations or claims. The "As text" button takes over the selected text; if nothing is selected but an object is, its entire text is taken. The Save dialog lets you edit the text before filing it away, and the "Formatting" switch optionally stores the type as well (typeface, size, bold/italic/underline, colour, paragraph alignment) — what was detected is shown as a short note next to the switch. It is managed like the other managers, with category, keywords, language, audience, author, status, classification, version and description, including search, filters, a Manage tab and network sharing. When inserting from the gallery, the selection in PowerPoint decides: if the cursor sits in a text, the block is placed at exactly that spot — and if something is selected there, it takes the place of the selection. If an object is selected as a whole, its text is replaced; if nothing is selected, a new auto-growing text box appears on the slide. The inserted passage stays selected afterwards, so you can carry straight on writing. Several selected texts are appended as paragraphs in the order of selection. Stored formatting is only carried over when inserting a single text, and when inserting at the cursor only onto the inserted piece — the alignment of the surrounding paragraph stays unchanged. Without captured formatting, the formatting of the target is left entirely untouched. The free version stores 5 texts, as with snippets; from Standard onwards there is no limit. created 15/08/2026
CHG Content managers (ribbon "Content Manager"), all areas (snippets, slides, storylines, actions, texts): a double-click on an entry inserts it again — for actions it runs it — and now does so in ALL five views. Until now the double-click only responded in the two tile views ("Tiles" and "By category"); in "Table", "List + picture" and "Tree" nothing happened at all. Since the manager remembers the view last chosen, inserting by double-click looked to many people as though it had disappeared altogether. The double-click now hangs centrally on the list rather than on the individual tile: it applies in Gallery and Manage alike, and in the Text Manager it works for the very first time. created 15/08/2026
CHG Ribbon: the "Advanced Snippet Editor" button is now called "Advanced Content Editor" — the editor creates not only snippets but actions and texts as well. It has also moved from the "Content Manager" group into the "Tools" group, where it sits with the other tools. Icon and function are unchanged; the new name also appears in the task pane title and in the help. created 15/08/2026
CHG Advanced Content Editor (ribbon "PPPTools", group "Tools", button "Advanced Content Editor"): the additional entry in the task pane's "=" burger menu is gone — the editor could be reached there a second time even though it has a ribbon button of its own. Two routes remain: the ribbon button, and "Edit code" in snippet or action management, which opens the script of the selected entry directly. Both check the Pro licence before the editor opens; the route through the burger menu did not — the editor opened without a licence too, and the block only became apparent when a script was run. Nothing changes in what the editor can do. While it is open the "=" button stays highlighted as before, but there is no longer a tick in the menu. created 16/08/2026

Add-in 2.0.3 – major update 2.0.3.0 20/08/2026

NEW PPPTools 2.0.3 — a major update with a new Content Manager, format dialogs of our own throughout and many improvements. The most important new features in overview (all the details in the list below). created 20/08/2026
NEW Text Manager: the fifth content manager, for reusable text blocks — legal notices, standard wordings, quotations or claims. Texts can be translated automatically and linked as language variants (5 texts free, unlimited from Standard upwards; automatic translation Pro). created 20/08/2026
NEW Format dialogs of our own throughout: colour, font, border and fill now open PPPTools dialogs of their own in place of the Windows ones — with a colour picker at the mouse pointer, design colours, an eyedropper with a magnifier, gradients with any colour stops you like and all 9 line styles. created 20/08/2026
NEW Colours keep their reference to the template: a design colour chosen ("Accent 1, 40 % lighter", say) is no longer frozen — where the deck changes its design, the colour travels along. This holds for Venn, the colour palettes and the new dialogs. created 20/08/2026
NEW Format dialogs straight from snippets: the Advanced Content Editor can ask for a colour, a font, a border or a fill in mid-run — per shape or depending on an intermediate result (Pro). created 20/08/2026
NEW Reload the library: objects added from outside (copied in by hand or through a sync folder) now appear at a click — with no restart. created 20/08/2026
CHG Format pane "Find & change": font and object rules can do considerably more — small capitals, superscript and subscript, character spacing, text highlighting, transparencies and all 9 line styles. created 20/08/2026
CHG Finishing touches: number fields in every pane now have up and down arrows, dialogs grow with their contents, backup shows progress and a log in the pane, and the "Advanced Snippet Editor" is now called the "Advanced Content Editor" (it edits actions and texts as well). created 20/08/2026

Add-in 2.0.2.0 14/08/2026

FIX Agenda Master (ribbon "Tools"), "Update" button: an order of agenda items changed in the task pane is now transferred to the slides correctly. Until now the order jumped back to its old state after updating, because the slides counted as authoritative. The division of roles is now unambiguous: "Update" writes the task pane onto the slides (the divider slides are moved to the new position together with their content slides), while "Read from slides" goes the other way and pulls an order changed in PowerPoint back into the task pane. created 14/08/2026
NEW Word cloud (ribbon "Tools"), "Settings" tab: new switch "Fit all words (shrink automatically instead of dropping them)". The word cloud used to leave terms out when they no longer found room in the area set — you would then get "62 of 100 words", say. With the new switch active, the whole cloud is instead recomputed step by step at a smaller size and rebuilt completely each time, until every distinct term really does fit — so no word you entered yourself is missing any more. There is a legibility limit: if the largest type would become too small, the process stops and leaves the rest out after all, rather than producing illegible micro-text; with very many words in a very small area, a larger area (cm) then helps as well. Since the cloud is recomputed several times, generating it takes somewhat longer and the type comes out smaller overall; in the "Repeat — words fill the shape" mode the switch has no effect. Off by default. created 14/08/2026
NEW Agenda Master (ribbon "Tools"), "Layout" tab: new switch "Create table of contents (overview slide)". Until now only "Create divider slides" controlled whether the section slides came into being — the table of contents put in front of them was always created. The table of contents can now be switched off too: this gives you either an agenda with divider slides only (no overview) or, the other way round, one with a table of contents only (no dividers). The switch works when creating and when updating — turn it off on an existing agenda and update, and the existing overview slide is removed; turn it back on and it is rebuilt in its old place. Both switches off at once is not possible, since no agenda slides would come into being at all; the switch that is last active therefore cannot be turned off. Existing presentations go on showing their table of contents unchanged. created 14/08/2026

Add-in 2.0.1.0 13/08/2026

NEW Puzzle (ribbon "Tools"): new live preview at the top of the puzzle panel. It shows schematically how the puzzle looks with the current settings — grid/picture as an interlocking lattice, strips with one or two rows and numbers, individual pieces side by side, words as scattered labelled pieces, and ring as a wreath of segments — and updates immediately on every change (mode, count, edge profile, palette/gradient, border, numbering, pieces selected). The preview is for orientation only and does not change the slide. created 11/08/2026
NEW Presentation formatting (ribbon "Tools"): new "Find & change" tab in the Format task pane. A rule-based find and replace for shapes: you define one or more rules following the pattern FIND -> DO. Matching works by text (contains/exact/starts/ends, optionally case-sensitive and whole word), by shape name, by shape type (picture, table, chart, SmartArt, text box, AutoShape, group, freeform, media, OLE) or "Everything" (no filter — to set a typeface everywhere, for instance). Available actions are: format the font, format the object (one mode switch each for the fill — unchanged, fill colour or no fill — and for the border — unchanged, adjust or no border — including border colour, width and style), replace found text, change capitalisation (UPPERCASE, lowercase, First Letter Capitalised, Sentence case), extend/tidy text (insert text before/after, remove surrounding whitespace, collapse repeated spaces), highlight text in colour, or delete shapes; a target switch determines whether only the found text or the whole shape is affected. Every rule can be named and copied with one click. The scope can be chosen (selection, current slide, slide range, whole presentation); the slide master and the layouts stay protected throughout. Sets of rules can be saved as named profiles and reused, and a preview shows how many matches each rule has before it is applied. A Pro tool. created 12/08/2026
CHG Find & change (Format task pane, "Find & change" tab): a rule can now carry out several "Do" steps one after another — recolouring a piece of text found, setting it in a different typeface and highlighting it, all in one go. Every step has a target switch of its own (only the matched text or the whole shape) and can be added, duplicated or removed on its own. The former individual actions "Set font colour" and "Set typeface" have been gathered into the action "Format font": the Windows font dialog sets typeface, size and bold, italic, underline and strikethrough in one step, and the font colour is chosen right beside it through the full colour picker (free choice of colour instead of a handful of standard colours). And the feedback after applying now counts the objects actually changed rather than every individual piece of formatting — several Do steps on the same shape count as one changed object. created 12/08/2026
CHG Find & change (Format task pane), action "Format object": fill and border now each have an explicit mode switch. For the fill you choose between "unchanged", "fill colour" and "no fill", for the border between "unchanged", "adjust" and "no border". The default in both cases is "unchanged", meaning a property is touched only if you expressly want it — so you can set nothing but the fill colour and leave the border alone, for instance, or the other way round. Also fixed: the border colour was not taken over on shapes that previously had no border at all — the border is now switched visible first and coloured afterwards, so that colour, width and style take reliably. created 12/08/2026
NEW Find & change (Format task pane): new action "Insert snippet (once per slide)". Where a rule matches all slides whose text contains "DRAFT", say, this action inserts a snippet exactly once on each slide affected — ideal for a watermark, a logo or a notice stamp on every matching slide. You can choose the snippet (picture and fragment snippets only), the corner of the slide (top/bottom left/right or centred) and the margin to the slide edge. The position deliberately refers to the SLIDE, not to the match, since only one insertion happens per slide. Code snippets are not possible here (they need the script route with parameter entry). A Pro tool. created 13/08/2026
NEW Find & change (Format task pane): new search criterion "Slide: too many typefaces/sizes". A QA and consistency finder that tracks down slides whose content uses more than a chosen number of different typefaces or font sizes — it returns one match line per slide affected. You can choose what to "Check for" (typefaces, font sizes or both), the threshold "More than" (1 to 5) and three switches for whether the title, the footer and header including slide number and date, and the notes are counted as well (off by default, so content text only). This is a quick way to find typographically overloaded slides — to count them through the preview, or in combination with "Insert snippet" to mark every slide affected with a notice stamp, say. A Pro tool. created 13/08/2026
NEW Find & change (Format task pane): new action "Replace shape (picture/snippet)". An object found (matched by shape name or shape type, say) is replaced by a picture or a snippet — the source can be a library snippet (picture and fragment snippets only) or a picture file from disk. The replacement takes over the position and the space of the original; "Size" determines how it is placed into the original box — fit (keep aspect ratio), fill and crop, stretch (exactly) or original (native size) — and "Align" its position within the box (9 points). The name and the z-order (bring forward/send backward) of the original are carried over as well, after which the original is removed (undo with Ctrl+Z). Useful for replacing every placeholder named "Customer logo" with the current logo in one go, for instance. Note: cropping in "fill" mode applies to pictures; fragment snippets are fitted instead. A Pro tool. created 13/08/2026

Add-in 2.0.1 — improvements 2.0.1.0 13/08/2026

NEW PPPTools 2.0.1 — a maintenance update with a new tool in the format pane and several improvements in detail (all the particulars in the list below). created 13/08/2026
NEW A new "Find & change" tab in the format pane: find texts and objects by rule and format or replace them in a single pass — with several action steps per rule and a QA finder that tracks down slides with too many typefaces or font sizes (Pro). created 13/08/2026
NEW Exchange objects in a targeted way: insert a snippet (once per slide) or replace an existing shape with a picture or a snippet. created 13/08/2026
NEW Puzzle generator: a live preview of the pieces while you are still setting them up. created 13/08/2026

Add-in 2.0.0.0 10/08/2026

CHG Content Manager, "Manage" area of the actions: the category tree can now be maintained by right-click for actions too — create a new (sub)category, rename, move and delete it — exactly as with snippets, slides and storylines. Renaming or moving a node automatically takes the actions concerned along; a node can only be deleted once no action (and no other object) is left in it, and the usage counters in the tree count actions as well. Side effect: renaming or deleting a value list (language or status, say) in the settings now brings the actions along consistently too — until now they were left out of it. created 30/07/2026
CHG Content Manager, tree view in the "Manage" area: when searching or filtering, the tree now shows only categories with matches — as the gallery does. Until now the complete category scaffolding stayed in place, so that a single search result hid among dozens of empty nodes. With no filter the tree still shows all categories including the empty ones, so that a category newly created by right-click is visible at once and can be worked on further; where an empty category is created while a filter is active, the context menu points out that it will only appear once the filter is gone. Standing filters from Settings/Default values (language, classification, status) do not count as a filter here. Applies to snippets, slides and storylines. created 30/07/2026
NEW Project plan generator (ribbon "Tools"): creates the time frame of a project plan as native shapes on the slide. The period is given either as From/To or as a start plus a duration (weeks, months, quarters) and rounded to month, quarter or financial-year boundaries. The header rows can be combined freely (financial year, calendar year, half-year, quarter, month, week, day), reordered and set to a height of their own per level; identical labels are merged and the label adapts to the column width. Alongside that: start of the financial year and its notation (FY26 / FY2025-26 / FY 25/26), quarters by calendar or financial year, week rule (ISO/US), language (de/en), automatic or fixed column grid, proportional or equally wide columns, gridlines, weekend shading, status line (today or a fixed date, with a label), text column width in per cent, position and size (including "Set to slide width") as well as colour scheme and typeface. A note in the panel shows the period, the grid and the number of columns in advance. The "Tasks" tab is where the task list is entered: per row a title, From/To, indentation (0 = phase, 1-3 = sub-items), the person responsible and optionally a bar colour of its own; rows can be moved and deleted, and a new task follows on in time from the previous one. Set "Milestone" and a diamond appears on the start date instead of the bar. What is rendered is the text column (indented, wrapping, responsible person on the right), the bars and the row separators; the bar colour lightens per level where none has been set explicitly. Alongside that: row height automatic (the tasks fill the height set) or fixed in points, bar height as a percentage of the row, and a font size of its own for the tasks. Tasks outside the period are reported, and partly overlapping bars are cropped at the edge. Where a plan already sits on the slide, the "On this slide" bar lists it with its period and number of tasks and fetches it back into the panel at a click — selecting it is no longer needed for that, and several plans on one slide are offered individually. "Update" always changes a plan on its own slide and jumps there, even where another slide is currently open; if its shapes have been deleted it is redrawn on the active slide. The bar colour is set through a colour picker instead of typed in as a hex value: what is offered is the accent colours of the deck, the shades of the chosen scheme — precisely the tones the plan assigns of its own accord — and a fixed basic stock; it is chosen in a window of its own, which also provides the Windows colour dialog and an exact hex value. The overall size can be prescribed: "Free", "Whole slide", "Content area (below the title)" or "Width to the slide only"; the prescription is recomputed at every draw, so a change of slide format (16:9 to 4:3) brings the plan along. Above the text column stand freely chosen column headings for the tasks and for the people responsible (leave empty = none). A degree of completion in per cent can be entered per task: the bar shows it with a hard edge, the part done fully coloured, the rest lightened — as a gradient within ONE shape, so the bar stays a single object. The degree of completion can be switched off for the whole plan without losing the values entered. In addition the "blocks only" layout (roadmap) is available: no text column and no rows — every block carries its title and description itself and sits freely in the time area. The blocks are distributed across LANES without overlapping (the first free lane from the top), or per task by hand if you prefer; the number of lanes can be fixed, so that the blocks stay the same height across several slides. Short tasks are stretched to an adjustable minimum width so that their title fits inside, and pushed left at the right-hand edge instead of being cropped. Milestones stand as a diamond with the text beside it; the text side can be chosen and flips to the left automatically as soon as the label would otherwise run off the slide. Also adjustable: showing and hiding the description as a second line, rounding the corners, the gap between lanes, and column lines dotted instead of solid. If the lanes are not enough the plan says so and lets nothing disappear. Degree of completion, colour picker and overall size apply in both layouts, and switching between table and blocks loses nothing — description and lane are kept in the table too. Bars can also be moved directly on the slide and the change computed back into the plan afterwards: the horizontal position becomes the date again, the width the duration, and vertically it determines the row (table) or the lane ("blocks only" layout). Milestones count with their centre here. Where the whole plan is moved or resized, all the dates stay untouched — this is recognised from the frame all the shapes measure themselves against. If you wish, the dates read back round to the nearest gridline. The plan is deliberately not redrawn straight away: the new dates appear in the list first and are taken over only with "Update". For a quick start there are templates: annual plan, quarterly plan, roadmap, financial year and a ready-made example plan; your own settings can be saved as a further template under a name and deleted again. A template sets only the framework — the task list you have entered stays in place, unless the template brings one of its own. "Example plan onto the slide" draws a complete plan with eight tasks in one step. Tasks can be read in instead of typed: from a text pasted in, straight from the clipboard (copied out of Excel, say) or from a file (.xlsx, .xlsm, .csv, .txt). Tab, semicolon and comma are recognised, as is — where present — a header row with the columns Task, Start, End, Responsible, Progress, Level, Milestone, Description, Predecessors and Colour; dates are read in the common notations and as an Excel serial number, transposed dates are put right, and unusable rows are passed over and reported individually. The tasks read in either replace the list or are appended to it, and "Fit period to the tasks" pulls From/To to the actual extent. New as well is the "Predecessors" field per task (numbers separated by commas): from it the plan draws dependency arrows if you wish — real connectors, which stay attached to the bar when it is moved on the slide. When tasks are moved and deleted the numbers come along, so they go on pointing at the same task. And the status line can be brought in with an animation: it wipes in from below at a click, and the label fades in with it. Alongside that, a fourth colour scheme, "Green". The gridlines can be formatted: line type (solid, dotted, dashed, dash-dot), weight in points and contrast (quiet, normal, strong). In addition a second, stronger separator can be drawn at every change of a coarser level — automatically one level above the grid (so at the start of the month with a weekly grid) or chosen explicitly, with its own line type, weight and contrast. Bars can be given rounded corners, and the milestone shape can be chosen (diamond, triangle, square, circle, star). Bars and milestones can be labelled: in the bar, optionally the title, the degree of completion, the title plus the degree of completion, the duration in days or From - To; beside the milestone, the title, the title plus the date or the date alone; "automatic" behaves as before. Every header level can be formatted individually — typeface, size, font colour, background colour and style (regular, bold, italic, bold italic); what is not set goes on following the colour scheme and the typeface of the plan. This is set in a format window of its own with a preview: in the panel there is now only ONE field per level, which already looks the way the level will later look on the slide, and a click on it opens the window. Colours are chosen there rather than typed — deck, scheme shades, basic stock, Windows colour dialog or hex value — every value can be set back to "automatic" individually, and "All automatic" resets the whole level. The same colour picker is available for the bar colour of a task and for the entries of the legend. The label of the status line now stands below the plan, centred under the line, instead of above it in the time area. And the panel has been reorganised: "Tasks" now holds nothing but the task list, "Display of the tasks" has moved to "Layout", and the Excel import sits in an "Import" tab of its own. The label of a bar can also stand to the right or left of it instead of inside it — there it has as much room as the row allows, even with very short bars, and at the edge of the time area it tips to the other side of its own accord. New is a "Legend" tab: any colours you like with a text of their own, shown as a square, as the milestone shape or as a dashed line, arranged below the plan. The entries flow side by side and wrap once the plan width is full, or stand in fixed columns if you prefer; alignment (left, centre, right), font size, distance to the plan and a title before the first entry can be set. "Take colours from the plan" enters every bar colour actually used in the plan exactly once — your own task colours with the title of the task, colours from the scheme as "Level N" — and adds milestone and status line as entries of their own; existing texts stay in place. The legend belongs to the plan group and travels along when it is moved. The panel is also wider (680 instead of 520 points), so that title, From, To and Responsible stand side by side per task instead of one below the other. The legend can also stand to the right of the plan instead of below it; it then takes width away from the time frame (at most 40 per cent of it), lists one row per entry and aligns optionally with the top edge, the centre or the bottom edge of the plan. In the "Layout" tab the groups now stand in the order Appearance, Shape and place on the slide, Display of the tasks. Fixed: after updating a plan, PowerPoint jumped to the first slide, because filing the settings away in the document resets the view — the view now stays on the plan's slide. created 27/07/2026
CHG Licence model: the project plan generator is unlimited from Pro upwards (trial included); below that, 1 plan a day can be newly created. A plan already created can always be "updated", and the panel itself is open to everyone. created 27/07/2026
NEW Agenda Master (ribbon "Tools"): turns an outline into a table of contents plus one divider slide per item, as native shapes on the slide. One item per line; indentation (tab or two spaces) makes a sub-item; per line, optionally "Title ; Responsible ; Minutes". The numbering (1, 1.1, 2 …) is assigned automatically, and the colour comes from the accent colour of the active design — so changing the design restyles the whole agenda. Where a divider slide is moved in PowerPoint, "Update" brings the order, the numbers and the table of contents into line with the new slide order; "Read from slides" fetches a stored agenda back into the panel. Divider and content slides are recognised by invisible markers, so your own content slides stay untouched. created 27/07/2026
CHG Licence model: the Agenda Master is a Pro tool — below Pro (and with no licence) the button opens the licence tab. created 27/07/2026
NEW Puzzle: new option "Centre text on the piece body" (Style tab, on by default) — numbers and labels now stand exactly one below the other in every mode, horizontally and vertically. Until now the text was centred on the bounding box, which every tab enlarges differently; the overhang of the tab is now compensated for and the text sits centred on the actual body of the piece. Switching it off restores the old behaviour. created 30/07/2026
NEW Layout tools (PPPTools ribbon, group "Distribute", button "Layout pane"): a new docked toolbox that stays open at the edge permanently and switches between tools through a tab bar — the slide itself is the preview, every action takes effect at once and can be undone with Ctrl+Z. It contains the tabs "Multiplier" and "Resizer"; the toolbox is laid out as an extensible box, and further layout tools will join it later as additional tabs. The toolbox itself is open to everyone. created 31/07/2026
NEW "Multiplier" tab in the layout toolbox (multiply & distribute): a selected object is copied and the copies distributed in one go — the slide itself is the preview, every setting takes effect at once and can be undone with Ctrl+Z. The direction is chosen through tiles. Arrangements: horizontal, vertical, diagonal, in a circle, on an arc, as a grid (columns freely chosen, horizontal/vertical) and along a selected guide line (freeform or line). The spacing is even, fixed in points or stacked; circle and arc know a radius, an arc angle, rotating the copies along and a "hub" (a centre object for hub-and-spoke pictures). The copies can be coloured — as a gradient or cyclically, through the same colour palettes as the word cloud and the puzzle, optionally with increasing transparency — and labelled consecutively: numbers, letters (A, B, C …), weekdays or a list of your own, with a freely chosen starting value. Alongside that, optional shrinking of the copies in per cent, "Count the original" and, if you wish, "Group new shapes" — all the copies together with the original are then gathered into one group at the end (off by default). The tab remembers the settings used and restores them automatically the next time it opens — even after a restart of PowerPoint; only the "along a guide line" arrangement comes back, logically enough, if the current selection allows for it. Unlimited from the Standard licence upwards. created 31/07/2026
NEW "Resizer" tab in the layout toolbox (Magic Resizer): scales the selected objects PROPORTIONALLY — if you wish, not only the size but, in the same ratio, the font size, the line weight and the internal margins of the text frame as well. A shrunken object then looks exactly the same, only smaller; dragged by the corner by hand, the type and the lines otherwise stay put and look too big. Four modes: by a factor in per cent, to a target width or height in centimetres, fitting into a rectangle (the slide area or the object selected last), and matching the width, the height or both of several objects (reference selectable: selected last, largest or smallest). Alongside that, an anchor point (centre, top left or keep position), a minimum font size when shrinking, and the automatic, temporary switching off of "Shrink text on overflow", so that that automation does not work against the scaling of the type. With groups, the type, the lines and the margins of the objects inside are brought along. The Resizer is a Pro tool. created 31/07/2026
CHG Layout toolbox: both tabs now show a live preview at the top — as with the Venn diagram. In the "Multiplier" tab it depicts, with exactly the same logic as applying, how count, direction (circle, arc, grid and along a guide line included), spacing, colouring and labelling affect the copies; it updates at once on every change and adapts to the current selection. In the "Resizer" tab a schematic before/after with an anchor point shows how much is being shrunk or enlarged — an "A" drawn alongside makes it visible whether the type scales along or (switched off) would stay too big in the box. For this the pane opens at the standard width of the Venn pane. created 01/08/2026
NEW Layout toolbox — remember & reset settings: both tabs (Multiplier and Resizer) now remember EVERY setting permanently, no longer only when applying, and restore them the next time the pane opens — even after a restart of PowerPoint and on every new slide. A new "⟲ Reset" button per tab sets everything back to the default values. created 01/08/2026
NEW Text Copilot (PPPTools task pane, menu ≡ → "Text Copilot"): an AI assistant that helps with reworking slide texts — shortening them, making them more pointed, rephrasing them, adjusting the tone (more formal or more relaxed) or breaking them into bullet points. You select one or more shapes on the slide, whose text is automatically passed along as context, and describe freely in the chat what is to be done; the conversation runs over several rounds, so the result can be refined step by step (send with Enter, line break with Shift+Enter). "Apply to selection" writes the last answer into the selected shape. The AI source is the same choice of engine as for translating (Claude, OpenAI, Gemini or Mistral) with the same API keys stored per provider; for optimising, though, an engine of its own can be chosen, independently of the translation engine — so you can translate with DeepL, say, but optimise with a language model. created 31/07/2026
CHG Licence model: the AI Text Copilot is a Pro tool — below Pro (and with no licence) calling it leads to the licence tab. created 31/07/2026
NEW Remove notes & comments (PPPTools ribbon, group "Tools"): creates a cleaned copy of the presentation without slide notes and/or comments at a single click — the original stays unchanged. A dialog offers "Both", "Notes only" or "Comments only" and shows in advance how many slides carry notes; an option "Open the cleaned version afterwards" can be switched on. What is removed is not only the classic comments but the modern (threaded) M365 comments as well, together with the associated author lists — which PowerPoint's usual "Delete all comments" function often fails to clear away completely. After the choice comes a "Save as" dialog with a suitable suggested name (the suffix depending on the choice); a note then reports how many notes and comments were removed. Non-destructive: no overwriting, no closing and reopening, no loss of the undo history. Free in every version. created 31/07/2026
CHG Manage API keys centrally: all the API keys now sit in one place under Settings (menu ≡ → "API keys") — DeepL, Claude, OpenAI, Gemini, Azure (with a region) and Mistral, one field per provider with a show/hide toggle. A click on "Check & save" makes a real test call to the provider and files the key away only if it succeeds. The former entry fields in the "Translate" and "Text Copilot" task panes are gone; all that stands there now is the choice of engine together with a status display (key stored yes/no) and a link into the settings. Keys already saved are kept and do not have to be entered again. created 31/07/2026
NEW Security: stored API keys are now encrypted with the Windows data protection function (DPAPI) — bound to the Windows user account, so that they no longer sit in plain text in the configuration file. This affects all translation and AI keys as well as the upload key of the online library. Existing configurations are converted automatically the first time they are saved; there is nothing to do. created 31/07/2026
NEW Agenda Master, format templates: the look of the table of contents and the divider slides can now be saved as an overarching template and reused in every presentation — colours, table style and divider layout are settled "on the sample" (not through PowerPoint table styles). "Edit (open sample presentation)" reopens a stored template for reformatting; where an older template still has no sample file, the sample slides are rebuilt from the stored template. In addition, free design elements on a sample slide (a logo, a decorative band, an icon) can be marked as agenda decoration with "Mark selection as decoration" — they are carried over 1:1 onto every slide of the same type when generating, while role and placeholder objects stay exempt from it. Where a template has been chosen, its colours determine the result; the accent colour choice is greyed out then, because it only takes effect without a template (the default). created 02/08/2026
FIX Agenda Master, editing a format template: where the sample presentation of a template is opened for editing, the task pane of the new window now has the corresponding template preselected (instead of "Default") and its name already entered — so "Save" lands in that same template again. Until now the task pane opened with an empty template choice. created 02/08/2026
CHG Agenda Master: choosing a template and editing a template are now separate. Which format template the current presentation uses is now chosen in the "Presentation" tab (group "Format template", together with the option "Layout from the master"). The "Template" tab now serves only for editing and managing, and for that has a choice of its own, "Template to edit" — independent of which template the deck is currently using. This makes it possible to edit, rename or delete any template without changing what the current presentation is assigned to; only deleting the template currently in use sets the deck back to "Default". created 02/08/2026
NEW Agenda Master: a click on the table of contents now jumps straight to the corresponding agenda or divider slide. In the "Configuration" tab (group "Hyperlinks") you can choose where the link sits: on a narrow extra column "…" of its own on the far right (the default), on the whole row, or on one particular column (number, topic and every active column such as time, duration, responsible or your own column) — or off altogether. Hovering shows a jump note; in the presentation a click is enough, in editing mode Ctrl+click. Divider slides must have been generated. A master switch "Hyperlinks active" (at the top of the "Hyperlinks" group, OFF by default) turns both kinds of hyperlink — this jump and the jump back — on or off together; where it is off, no hyperlinks are set at all (and the narrow "…" extra column falls away), regardless of the drop-downs below it. created 02/08/2026
NEW Agenda Master: every content slide can now carry a hyperlink back to the agenda. In the "Configuration" tab (group "Hyperlinks"), "Jump back on every slide" determines which placeholder the link sits on (title, subtitle, footer, date or slide number), and "Jump back points to" chooses the destination: the corresponding divider slide (the default) or the table of contents. The link is set on all the slides between the dividers; the corresponding divider slide follows from the order and stays correct when things are re-sorted. Where the chosen placeholder is missing on a slide, that slide is skipped. Divider slides must have been generated. created 02/08/2026
NEW Agenda Master: table of contents, divider and content slides can now be titled automatically. In the "Configuration" tab (group "Title management") you set one template each for the main title and the subtitle of ToC, divider and content slides — with placeholders such as [[NO]] (number), [[TOPIC]], [[RESPONSIBLE]], [[DURATION]] and [[TIME]]. For divider and content slides the title can be derived from the agenda item itself or from a superordinate item: [[MAIN_NO]]/[[MAIN_TOPIC]] refer to the main item (the top level), [[PARENT_NO]]/[[PARENT_TOPIC]] to the item directly above — so that all the slides of a section carry a uniform title carried along with them; ToC titles know the presentation metadata ([[TITLE]], [[DATE]]). The token picker is grouped by origin; a click inserts the token into the field last chosen, and an empty field leaves the title in question untouched. A master switch "Title management active" (OFF by default) turns the whole automation on and off (off = nothing is set any more, and what exists stays). The ToC heading itself is exempt (the field "ToC main title", default "Agenda"): it is the agenda heading and is always set, regardless of the master switch. All the title fields — the ToC main title included — now sit gathered in the "Title management" group; the "Slide colour" group (formerly "Slide title & colour") now holds nothing but the accent colour. With "Do not overwrite manually changed titles", titles adjusted by hand survive "Update" (off: PPPTools always rewrites the template titles); where an agenda item is renamed, the managed titles follow automatically. For decks whose layouts bring no (sub)title placeholder of the usual type — corporate masters with freely created placeholders, say — the destination can now be determined explicitly, once per layout as part of the template definition: in the "Template" tab (group "Title destinations on the layout"), select the placeholder you want in the slide master and set it with "Selection → main title destination" or "Selection → subtitle destination"; "Release title destination marking" undoes the assignment. The marking sits on the layout of the master and travels with it (into new decks too); it applies to all the content slides of that layout and takes precedence over automatic recognition by placeholder type. Only placeholders can be marked (free text boxes of a layout do not appear on the slides as objects of their own); the chosen placeholder is written to with the title, so the content placeholder should not be the one chosen. The Agenda Master is a Pro tool. created 04/08/2026
CHG Agenda Master, format templates: a format template can now contain several named variants — for the table of contents as well as for the divider slides. When saving "on the sample", every ToC and divider sample created in the sample is taken over as a named variant of its own; exactly one per collection counts as the default. In the current presentation you choose in the "Presentation" tab, through "Table of contents", which ToC variant the deck uses, and per agenda item in its row, through "Divider variant", which divider design that item is given — so that main sections can be divided differently from sub-items, for instance. Where a collection has only a single variant, the choice is hidden; "(Default)" or an empty field uses the variant marked as the default. Changing the format template discards the item-by-item divider assignments, since the variants belonged to the previous template. To tell them apart more easily, both choice lists show a small preview picture of the sample slide per variant — it is created automatically when the template is saved "on the sample" and filed away with the template (older templates without a preview go on showing nothing but the name). created 05/08/2026
FIX Agenda Master, format templates with decoration and several divider variants: free decorative elements (a logo, a decorative band, an icon) are now taken over for every divider by variant. Until now the decoration of a NON-default variant (a "Coffee break" divider with a picture, say) could wrongly land on dividers that actually use the default variant without decoration — sometimes one way, sometimes the other, depending on the order of the sample slides. Every divider now gets exactly the decoration of its resolved variant; the default divider stays clean. This applies equally to several table-of-contents variants. created 05/08/2026
FIX Agenda Master, divider variants when updating: change the divider variant of an agenda item (back from "Coffee break" to the default divider, say) and click "Update", and the divider slide affected is now exchanged completely for the new variant — with its layout, its placeholders and its decoration. Until now the existing slide was merely relabelled and the old variant layout, or its decoration, stayed in place, so that the slide looked empty or wrong when you switched back (only "Create agenda" exchanged it cleanly). Unchanged dividers are still updated quickly in place. Also fixed: changing the divider variant of an item in the panel and clicking "Update" made the choice fall back to the default and closed the row's unfolded detail area — when the panel was rebuilt the variant was not taken over from the outline and the unfolded state was not remembered. The variant chosen is now kept and open rows stay open. created 05/08/2026
NEW Agenda Master, format templates — divider meta fields freely placeable: on the text divider sample slide, "Responsible", "Time slot", "Duration" and "Own column" can now be positioned and formatted freely as individual elements. When saving "on the sample" the template remembers the position and the style of each of these fields; when generating, each field appears in its own place on the divider slide. Fields not created as elements of their own in the sample go on appearing gathered in one row as before — so older templates are unaffected. created 05/08/2026
CHG Agenda Master, controlling divider fields individually: which information fields appear on the text dividers can now be determined separately per field — for all seven fields: number, topic/title, responsible, time slot, duration, own column and number of sub-items — independently of which columns the table of contents shows. In the "Layout" tab (new group "Divider fields") each field has a choice of "Template / always on / always off". "Template" shows the field as the chosen format template provides for it — number and title at their template position (or hidden, where the sample element was removed), the remaining fields at their own position where the template has a placeholder element for it, otherwise gathered in one row; where the template has no element of its own, the previous default applies (number and title on, the remaining fields following the ToC column switches, and the sub-item count following its ToC setting), so that existing presentations are unaffected. "Always on" shows the field on all the dividers — number and title too, even where the template had removed them; "always off" hides it everywhere (number or title included). This makes it possible to bring the person responsible in quickly while rehearsing and hide them again for the presentation, without changing the template. The table of contents and the ToC dividers are still controlled by the column switches at the top. created 07/08/2026
FIX Central backup: the scope of what is secured has been extended. The backup (Settings/Administrator) now backs up and restores the Venn presets, the project plan presets, the puzzle presets, the settings of the multiply tool, the emoji favourites and the agenda format templates as well — until now these were lost on a fresh installation or a change of machine. The only things deliberately not backed up are the daily usage allowances and the licence. created 08/08/2026
CHG Agenda Master, table of contents — choosing and arranging columns: in the "Layout" tab (group "ToC columns & order") you now determine in ONE list which columns the table of contents shows and in what order they stand. Every column can be moved with an up/down arrow and switched on or off individually; "Number" and "Topic" are the base columns and always come first. Available are time, duration, responsible, your own column and the number of sub-items (carried along in the topic field). Until now the columns could only be switched on and off individually through fixed switches, with no influence on their order. created 08/08/2026
NEW Agenda Master, several agendas in one deck: a deck can now contain several agenda areas independent of one another — an agenda of its own with its own table of contents and its own divider slides per day of a workshop, for instance. The "Presentation" tab is divided for this into "Global" (which applies to the whole deck: format template, ToC variant, accent colour and the deck metadata) and the current area (the header data of that particular agenda). A choice at the top switches between the areas, "+ New" creates another, and it can be renamed or deleted; when you switch, the entries of the previous area are taken over automatically and the new one is loaded. "Continue numbering from the previous area" can be switched on per area, so that the items count through across several agendas instead of starting again at 1 each time. Existing presentations with exactly one agenda go on working unchanged. created 08/08/2026
CHG Agenda template designer as a task pane of its own: designing and managing the agenda format templates has moved out of the agenda panel into a task pane of its own, "PPPTools: Agenda templates" — opened through the new ribbon button "Agenda templates" in the "Tools" group. The designer has four tabs: "Template" (open, name, sample slides), "Variants" (named ToC and divider variants), "Design" (placeholders, decoration and title destinations) and "Options", plus a fixed footer bar with "Save as template" and "Cancel". The agenda panel itself now keeps only the assignment to the current presentation: which template and which ToC variant the deck uses ("Presentation" tab) and the master layout ("Layout" tab). The former "Template" tab in the agenda panel therefore falls away. created 08/08/2026
NEW Agenda template designer, inserting placeholders at a click: when designing a sample slide in the "Design" tab, the available agenda placeholders (number, topic, responsible, time, duration, own column) can now be inserted into the sample slide's text box last chosen as clickable chips, instead of typing the [[TOKEN]] notation by hand. This makes it clear at a glance which details the template will later fill automatically. created 08/08/2026
CHG Central backup as a task pane of its own with fine-grained choice: backing up and restoring now runs through a panel of its own with two tabs ("Back up" and "Restore"). Instead of all or nothing, every category can be chosen individually — the library objects (snippets, slides, storylines, actions, value lists) as well as all the settings and presets (among them export, word cloud, Venn, project plan and puzzle presets, multiply settings, emoji favourites) and the agenda format templates as an area of their own. Backing up and restoring are independent of one another; when restoring, individual settings files are overwritten, while library objects are only added to and never overwritten. Where it is called from has moved into the ribbon: group "Tools", button "Backup" on the far right (previously under Content Manager next to "Settings"). created 08/08/2026
CHG Agenda Master, managing PowerPoint sections automatically: to match the agenda items, the Agenda Master now creates real PowerPoint sections — the collapsible bands in the slide sorter. In the "Configuration" tab (a new, collapsible group "Section management") there is a main switch "Section management active" — analogous to title management, OFF by default: where it is off, PPPTools does not touch existing sections at all. Where it is on, sections are created per chosen item type when generating AND updating, renamed to "Number + title", and orphaned sections of this agenda are merged back into the preceding one (the slides are kept). "Section per main item" (on by default) and "Section per sub-item" (off by default) determine which level sections come into being for. Every section is anchored to the divider slide of its item; sections created by hand or belonging to other agenda areas stay untouched. Older decks in which "Create sections" used to be active are converted automatically to sections per main item. created 09/08/2026
CHG Agenda Master, a clearer "Configuration" tab: the settings are now arranged into areas that fold in and out — duration calculation and structure stand open, and the rarer areas (section management, hyperlinks, title management) are folded away. Also: a time slot of zero length (start equals end) is no longer given out as "09:15-09:15" but left empty. This affects only items that really do last 0 minutes; in the "sub-items onto main item" and "bottom-up" modes it arises in any case only with a single leaf item with no duration. created 09/08/2026
CHG Agenda Master, new "Preset" tab: whole agendas — items, layout and configuration — can be saved under a name and loaded again. The preset choice, saving/renaming/deleting your own presets and the "Create example deck" button have moved out of the "Agenda items" tab into this tab of its own, so that the agenda items view has more room. The former "Demo content" button falls away: the demo content slides now sit in the example preset supplied, which "Create example deck" builds in one go. A deleted example agenda can therefore be created again at any time. When saving, "with contents" determines whether the agenda items are saved along with it (off = a pure layout/configuration preset). created 09/08/2026
NEW Presentation formatting (ribbon "Tools", button "Format"): a new docked task pane with two tabs — "Watermark" and "Footer" — which sets watermarks and footers for the whole presentation. Each tab has a main switch at the top ("Watermark management active" and "Footer management active"): where it is off the fields are greyed out and "Apply" removes the elements managed by PPPTools from the slides again. At the very top of each tab a live preview in 16:9 format — as with the Venn diagram — shows how every setting takes effect; placeholders are filled with example values there and update at once on every change. Watermark: freely chosen text with placeholders (such as [[CLASSIFICATION]], [[PRESENTATION_TITLE]], [[PRESENTER]]), colour as a hex value, position and size in centimetres, font size, rotation and transparency; it can be shown and hidden separately per slide type (title, table of contents, main and sub-item dividers, content). It is implemented as one named text box per slide, which is updated rather than duplicated when applied again. Footer: a footer text of its own per slide type (hidden slides included), a date with a freely chosen format, and a slide number with a whole format "[[x]] / [[X]]" including leading zeros ([[x]]/[[xx]]/[[xxx]] for the number, [[X]]/[[XX]]/[[XXX]] for the total); it can be determined separately per slide type whether the footer, the date and the number appear and whether the slide is counted. Where an agenda is present in the deck, the pane reads its classification and metadata read-only to fill the placeholders; with no agenda the corresponding placeholders stay empty. created 09/08/2026
NEW Agenda Master, hiding whole kinds of slide in the presentation: in the "Layout" tab (new group "Hide in presentation") the table of contents, the main-item dividers and the sub-item dividers can each be hidden for the slide show. The slides stay in the deck but are skipped when presenting (PowerPoint's "Hide slide"). The switches take effect deck-wide when generating and when updating; switching them off shows the slides affected again. created 09/08/2026
NEW Agenda Master, numbering per agenda area: the starting number and "Continue numbering from the previous area" now belong to the agenda area in question and stand in the "Presentation" tab in the group of the current area (previously in the "Configuration" tab, deck-wide). Every area therefore has a starting number of its own; where "continue" is off (the default) the area begins at its starting number, otherwise it follows on from the last number of the previous area. created 09/08/2026
CHG Agenda Master, a clearer "Layout" tab: as in the "Configuration" tab, the settings are now arranged into areas that fold in and out — ToC columns & order, divider slides and ToC display stand open, and the rest (divider fields, table of contents, hide in presentation) are folded away. created 09/08/2026
CHG Agenda Master, example deck with example content slides: "Create example deck" ("Preset" tab) now puts realistic example content slides behind every divider slide — with changing sub-topics (starting position, key points, figures, discussion, next steps) and fitting bullet points instead of placeholder text. The example deck created therefore feels like a real, structured presentation. created 09/08/2026
FIX Agenda Master fixed: a few panel switches used to take effect only on "Create", not on "Update" — the continuation of the numbering and the section management options were not taken over from the panel when updating. All these options now take effect when updating too. created 09/08/2026
NEW Agenda Master, your own presets with a free description: when saving a preset of your own you can now enter an optional description, which appears below the choice field. Left empty, an automatic default text applies as before. created 09/08/2026
FIX Agenda Master fixed: a fresh presentation now starts with an empty agenda (a single empty line) instead of a pre-filled demo agenda. The example agenda can still be loaded when needed, through the "Example agenda" preset in the "Preset" tab. created 09/08/2026
FIX Agenda Master, "Agenda items" tab: new rows now come into being where you are working. If you are in a row, "+ Sub-item" inserts the new sub-item directly below that item, and "+ Item" puts the new main item after its complete block (the item together with its sub-items) — until now both landed at the end of the list and had to be pushed up by hand. With no active row they are still appended at the end. created 09/08/2026
FIX Agenda Master, "Update": now takes over structural changes from the panel as well. Where you have added or deleted an item or a sub-item, "Update" inserts the missing divider slide in the right place, or removes a superfluous one, and rebuilds the table of contents — the agenda no longer has to be created afresh for that. Existing items are found again through their invisible marker, so that manual changes to their slides are preserved. Until now "Update" left added items out and merely pointed out that the agenda should be created again. created 09/08/2026
FIX Agenda Master, "Read from slides": now reads the agenda items into the panel in the current order of the slides. Where you have re-sorted divider slides or whole sections in PowerPoint, the panel reflects that order at once; until now it showed the order last saved. Reading remains purely read-only and does not change the slides — renumbering the slides themselves still happens only with "Update". created 09/08/2026
NEW Agenda Master, new "Statistics" tab: shows at a glance how the deck is distributed across the agenda. At the top a presentation total across all the agenda areas (chips for ToC, dividers, content slides, front matter and "Slides in total"), and below it a table of its own per agenda area: a row "Before the agenda" for the front matter, a row "Table of contents" with the slides belonging to it (the ToC itself plus content slides standing directly behind it before the first divider), then a duration and a number of content slides per agenda item, plus a total row. Every slide of the deck is thereby assigned to exactly one area and the totals add up cleanly. In addition a small figures line (duration and number of slides) now appears right by every agenda item in the "Agenda items" tab, which follows along as you type and after every create/update. The numbers update when the tab is opened, after "Create"/"Update" and through the refresh button of their own. created 10/08/2026

Add-in 2.0 — major update 2.0.0.0 10/08/2026

NEW PPPTools 2.0 — the largest update so far, with several completely new tools and a much extended Agenda Master. The most important new features in overview (all the details in the list below). created 10/08/2026
NEW Project plan generator: produce schedules and roadmaps straight on the slide — with a financial year, header levels, proportional columns and colour palettes (Pro). created 10/08/2026
NEW Layout toolbox: a docked pane with "Multiply & distribute" and the new Magic Resizer for scaling proportionally, fonts, lines and margins included (Pro). created 10/08/2026
NEW Text Copilot: an AI chat for improving and rewriting slide texts, which can be taken over straight from the selection (Pro). created 10/08/2026
NEW Presentation formatting: a new pane for watermarks and footers with a live preview, controllable separately per slide type. created 10/08/2026
NEW Central backup rebuilt: a panel of its own that backs up and restores every category individually — library objects, all the settings and presets, and the agenda format templates. created 10/08/2026
NEW Agenda Master much extended: several agendas per deck, automatic PowerPoint sections, freely chosen ToC columns, individually controllable divider fields, a template designer of its own and a new statistics tab. created 10/08/2026
NEW Besides those: "Remove notes & comments" (free of charge) and a central, DPAPI-encrypted management of all the API keys. created 10/08/2026

Online help 1.0.174 30/07/2026

NEW New help page "Multiply & distribute": the newly built tool with a live preview — arrangements (horizontal, vertical, diagonal, circle, arc, grid, along a guide line), a hub for the circle, colouring the copies (a palette plus a transparency gradient), labelling them in sequence (numbers, letters, weekdays, a list of your own) and the "↺ Last" button. created 30/07/2026

Online help 1.0.171 30/07/2026

CHG Help "Hierarchical categories": added that the category tree can now be maintained by right-click in the Manage view of the actions as well — snippets, slides, storylines and actions alike. Renaming, moving and deleting bring along the objects affected of all four types; a node can only be deleted where no action remains in it either. created 30/07/2026

Online help 1.0.170 30/07/2026

CHG Help "Hierarchical categories": a new section "Empty categories in the Manage tree" — why the Manage tree shows empty categories, that when searching and filtering only nodes with hits still appear, and that an empty category newly created while a filter is active becomes visible only once the filter is off (standing filters from the default values do not count). created 30/07/2026

Add-in 1.2.0.0 26/07/2026

FIX Online library: in Manage the source is now shown correctly as "Online"; publishing is blocked in online mode, and with actions, "Open folder" can no longer be opened there. created 12/07/2026
CHG Advanced Snippet Editor: the Save menu has been rearranged — grouped by "Action" and "Snippet", each with "Object", "ZIP" and "Draft in the online library". When exporting a snippet the preview picture is now created before saving and shown in the dialog. created 14/07/2026
NEW Advanced Snippet Editor: a preview picture can now be chosen by hand for the action ZIP export and for an action draft into the online library. created 14/07/2026
CHG Minor improvements to the Save dialogs: a larger description field and wider "Cancel" buttons. created 14/07/2026
NEW QR code generator: insert a URL, a text, a contact (vCard), Wi-Fi access, an email or a calendar appointment onto the slide as a QR code — optionally as a picture or as native, losslessly scalable shapes. With a live preview, error correction L/M/Q/H, freely chosen colours (the template accent colours are available in the colour dialog) and a logo from a file, from the slide selection or from snippet management. From 600 shapes upwards, native mode asks first. created 18/07/2026
CHG Licence model: a daily allowance for the first time — the QR code generator is unlimited from Standard upwards (trial included), and in the free version 3 codes a day can be inserted. The preview always stays unlimited. created 18/07/2026
NEW Word cloud generator: word clouds from a list of terms, from continuous text or straight from slides, notes and files (txt, docx, xlsx, pdf) — optionally as native, individually editable text boxes or as a densely interlocked picture. With shapes (ellipse, circle, triangle, heart, cloud or a shape of your own that you have selected), words inside the shape or as a frame outside it, three density levels, size modes including "Top 1/3/5/10 large", the main term in the centre, diagonal layouts, 14 colour palettes plus "Colours from a picture", filters (filler words, minimum length, numbers, your own stop words) and a reproducible layout. Guaranteed free of overlaps. created 18/07/2026
CHG Licence model: the word cloud generator is unlimited from Standard upwards (trial included); in the free and trial versions the 10 most frequent terms are used per cloud. All the other options remain usable without restriction. created 18/07/2026
NEW Word cloud generator: excluded words can now be saved, loaded and deleted as named lists (%AppData%\PPPTools\wordcloud_excludes.xml); the text last entered is remembered automatically. The exclusion now takes effect on EVERY form of input — until now excluded terms were not removed from a finished "term,count" list (that is, from an import). created 18/07/2026
CHG The word cloud panel is now divided into two tabs: "Data" (main term, word list, import) and "Settings" (appearance, shape, filters, exclusion lists). The main term now stands at the very top above the word list; the buttons "Create word cloud on slide" and "Rearrange" and the status line stay fixed at the bottom and can be reached from both tabs. created 18/07/2026
NEW Word cloud presets in a "Presets" tab of their own: save, apply and delete configurations under a name. A short summary shows what is in the chosen preset before you apply it. When saving, the option "Incl. words" decides whether only the settings are filed away (a pure style template) or the main term, the word list and the excluded words as well; an existing word list is never overwritten unnoticed. In addition the panel remembers the settings last used, words included, automatically (%AppData%\PPPTools\wordcloud_presets.xml). created 18/07/2026
FIX Backup: the "Settings" area now backs up and restores the preset files as well — export presets, word cloud presets and word cloud exclusion lists. Until now only app_config.xml was included, so the export presets were lost on a change of machine. created 18/07/2026
NEW Word cloud: a new button "Export words as CSV" writes the prepared list as "term;count" — that is, with the count from continuous text and the filters already applied. Semicolon and UTF-8 with a BOM, so that German Excel opens the file straight into columns and with the umlauts correct; with no header row, so that it can be loaded again unchanged. created 18/07/2026
FIX Word cloud file import: txt/csv are now read with encoding detection (BOM, strict UTF-8, otherwise Windows-1252). CSV files saved by Excel are usually ANSI-encoded — until now their umlauts arrived as question marks. created 18/07/2026
NEW Venn diagram in a panel of its own (ribbon "Venn (new)"): instead of the previous 2 or 3 circles, now 2 to 7 sets, optionally as a complete Venn or as a ring arrangement in which only neighbouring circles overlap. Texts and formats are kept per area and adapt automatically to the number of sets; empty text fields create no shape. Templates are now held per user and are therefore available in every presentation — when applying, only geometry, colours and typefaces are taken over, and the texts entered stay in place. created 18/07/2026
NEW Venn diagram: a diagram created can now be fetched back into the panel with "Take settings from the selected diagram", adjusted, and redrawn in place with "Update". This becomes possible because all the settings, texts included, are saved along in the presentation — until now diagrams could only be created afresh, and the texts were not stored anywhere. created 18/07/2026
NEW Venn diagram: the panel points out where a chosen arrangement cannot geometrically produce all the areas at all — a complete Venn is only possible with circles up to 3 sets. The areas affected are greyed out in the "Texts" and "Format" tabs. Cutting the circles into real, freely colourable individual areas, on the other hand, works with any number of sets — in a ring these are the individual sets and the neighbouring intersections, a manageable number; with a complete Venn with many sets, correspondingly many arise. created 18/07/2026
NEW Venn diagram: a live preview at the top of the "Settings" tab shows the arrangement of the circles and responds at once to the number of sets, the alignment, the arrangement and the size — so the result is visible before it is written onto the slide. created 24/07/2026
NEW Venn diagram: a new "Colour scheme" colours the whole diagram at a click with a ready-made palette. A palette is one base colour per set; the intersections are derived from those (a blend, somewhat darker with the depth of nesting), so that every scheme adapts automatically to 2 to 7 sets. The same palettes are available as in the word cloud tool, plus gradients stretched evenly across the sets. created 20/07/2026
CHG Venn diagram: the ring option "Centre as an area of its own" now draws a real centre circle from 4 sets upwards — an area of its own that can be coloured and labelled (kept as "Centre" in the "Texts" and "Format" tabs) instead of merely a text frame. This makes it possible to show a shared core in the middle of the ring. created 26/07/2026
CHG The Venn panel is divided into three tabs — "Settings" (structure and templates), "Texts" (all the labels) and "Format" (colours and lines). The buttons "Create new", "Update" and "Take settings from the selected diagram" and the status line stay fixed at the bottom and can be reached from every tab. created 22/07/2026
CHG Venn diagram: in the "Texts" tab the area texts run over two lines and are indented flush left (the name of the area plus an entry field), each line with a font button of its own. New buttons pass a typeface on to all the areas, and depending on the number of sets, thematic example texts can be inserted. created 23/07/2026
CHG Licence model: the Venn diagram is unlimited from Standard upwards (trial included); in the free version 1 diagram a day can be newly created. A diagram already created can always be "updated", and the live preview stays unlimited. created 25/07/2026
FIX Venn diagram: "Insert example texts" now overwrites all the text fields (title, sets and areas) with the example for the current number of sets — where texts are already present, it asks once beforehand. This fixes old area texts staying behind in the individual areas when switching from 3 to 4 or 5 sets. created 26/07/2026
NEW Word cloud: two new colour entries derived from the active slide design instead of from a fixed list. "Template accent, single colour" builds six brightness steps out of the first accent colour — the darkest goes to the largest word, the lightest to the smallest. "Accent colour + grey (highlight the top ones)" sets the strongest terms in the accent colour and all the rest in shades of grey; how many are highlighted follows the font size mode (Top 3/5/10). Both are consistent with a corporate identity and quieter than "Template colours", which puts all the accents side by side. created 18/07/2026
CHG Word cloud: with single-colour palettes the colours are now assigned by rank rather than in rotation — a gradation of brightness otherwise looks randomly distributed. Colourful palettes are unchanged. created 18/07/2026
NEW Word cloud: eight new colour palettes — Blue single colour, Teal & coral, Nordic, Berry, Retro 70s, Mint & anthracite, Deep blue & gold, and Wine red. The two single-colour ones (Blue single colour, Wine red) are assigned by rank: the darkest step for the largest word. That makes 21 fixed palettes plus Template colours, Template accent single colour, Accent colour + grey, and Colours from a picture. created 18/07/2026
CHG Word cloud tidying round: "Deep blue & gold" darkened (the pale yellows were barely legible on white at a small size), "Greyscale" is now assigned by rank like the other single-colour palettes (dark = large), and unused code from the earlier placement approach has been removed. created 18/07/2026
CHG Word cloud telemetry completed: "Create word cloud" and "Rearrange" can now be told apart (wordcloud.trigger.create / .rearrange); presets and exclusion lists report saving, applying and deleting. The existing event names are unchanged. created 18/07/2026
NEW Snippet assets: additional files in a snippet are now checked against a positive list — pictures (PNG, JPG, JPEG, SVG) and data (XML, CSV, JSON) are allowed. SVG files are additionally examined for embedded scripts and external references. created 18/07/2026
NEW Snippets can bring along and use files of their own — pictures or data lists, for instance. Access is limited to the folder of the snippet in question; paths leading outside it are rejected. created 18/07/2026
NEW When saving as a ZIP and when uploading to the online library, an object's supplied files are now packed along completely — from subfolders as well. This affects the Advanced Snippet Editor as well as saving as a ZIP in snippet, slide and storyline management. created 18/07/2026
FIX When restoring a backup, files from an object's subfolders were lost — they are now written back completely. created 18/07/2026
FIX Security: when unpacking downloaded objects and when restoring backups, paths are now strictly confined to the destination directory. created 18/07/2026
NEW Snippet management: with code snippets, "Edit code" and "New preview picture" are now available below the preview picture. "Edit code" opens the code.cs in the Advanced Snippet Editor — a reduced bar appears there (Run / Save / New preview picture / Close), and "Save" overwrites precisely that snippet, with the metadata unchanged. "New preview picture" runs the script with the parameter dialog, creates a new preview.png from the objects produced and removes them again. With fragment and picture snippets both buttons stay hidden. "Edit code" needs a Pro licence (like the editor itself), while "New preview picture" can be used from Free upwards. created 18/07/2026
FIX Advanced Snippet Editor: the author entered in the Save dialog was not taken over for snippets — it landed in the "Submitted by" field instead of the author field. As a result, the author stayed empty in Manage, searching by author did not find the snippet, and the online upload was rejected because of the missing mandatory field. This affected "As a snippet object", "As a snippet ZIP" and "As a snippet draft in the online library". Snippets already saved keep the empty author and have to be filled in once. "Submitted by" is now set exclusively when publishing (the Windows user) — which until now did not hold for actions either. created 18/07/2026
FIX Security: reflection is no longer permitted in snippet scripts. It could previously be used to reach blocked functions. created 18/07/2026
CHG Objects from the online library now load their supplied files individually as needed rather than as a complete package. Inserting extensive snippets is thereby markedly faster. created 18/07/2026
NEW When uploading to the online library, supplied files are now checked against the permitted file types on the server side as well. Pictures (PNG, JPG, JPEG, SVG), data (XML, CSV, JSON) and PowerPoint contents (PPTX) are allowed — macro-enabled files expressly are not. created 19/07/2026
NEW Word cloud: new option "Placement" for the main term — "Large in the centre" (around 55 % of the width) or "Band across the full width" (around 92 %). The main term is then set in a fixed place and the remaining words pack themselves around it; the font size follows from the target width. Together with "Outside the shape" it lands in the free area of the shape — so the term is in the centre and the words form a frame around it. created 18/07/2026
NEW Word cloud: a 22nd colour palette, "Orange & cyan (dark slides)" — strong orange, cyan and white. It contains white and is therefore legible only on dark slides. created 18/07/2026
NEW Word cloud: new option "Free area in the centre" (none / 25 / 40 / 55 / 70 %). It keeps an area free in the centre in the CHOSEN SHAPE — rectangle, circle, ellipse, triangle, heart, cloud or a shape of your own that you have selected — and the words lay themselves around it as a frame. A main term is set into that area and scaled to it; with no main term it stays empty, for a picture or a logo, say. This makes the frame look possible for the first time: until now "Outside the shape" created no mask at all with a rectangle, and only the four corners with the other shapes. created 18/07/2026
NEW Word cloud: a new "Mode" tab with ten ready-made combinations — Classic, Main term embedded, Banner, Dominant, Frame square, Frame round, Silhouette, One word fills the shape, Outline outside, and Colours from a picture. Every mode shows a drawn sketch and sets shape, free area and placement all at once at a click; the cloud is deliberately NOT rebuilt straight away, so that it can be adjusted first. To distinguish them: a mode is a built-in starting point, a preset is a configuration of your own that you have saved. created 18/07/2026
NEW Word cloud: the frame thickness can now be given directly in cm — the choice "own frame thickness (cm)" plus a number field, instead of choosing the free area in per cent. Width and height are computed separately, so that the frame is the same thickness all the way round even with a wide area; with round shapes the value applies at the narrowest point. created 18/07/2026
FIX Word cloud: the "Banner" mode behaved like "Main term embedded". The height cap was too strict at 34 % — to reach 92 % of the width, a short term needs large type, whose height broke the cap; the font size was then computed back down and the band became a medium-sized word in the centre. The cap now stands at 60 %. In addition the panel now reports where a placement has been chosen but no main term entered, or where the term did not fit the fixed position — until now it fell back silently on the normal path there. created 18/07/2026
FIX Word cloud, "Banner" mode: words still stood beside and between the letters of the bar. The reason was that only the glyph ink of the main term was marked as occupied — the gaps between the letters and the margins stayed free and were filled up. With a band, the WHOLE strip at that height across the full width is now blocked; the remaining words now fill up only above and below it. created 18/07/2026
CHG Word cloud: the tabs now look like tabs rather than like buttons — a continuous line below the bar, the active tab with an accent underline and coloured, bold lettering; the inactive ones discreetly grey with a hover state. created 18/07/2026
NEW Word cloud: in the "Mode" tab the active mode is highlighted. The marking is DERIVED from the current settings rather than remembered — change something in the "Settings" tab that no longer matches any mode and it disappears. So it never shows a mode that is no longer set at all. created 18/07/2026
CHG Word cloud: the modes "Frame square" and "Frame round" now set the free area to "own frame thickness (cm)" with 4 cm, rather than to a percentage. The frame width can therefore be controlled directly through the "Frame thickness (cm)" field — and the mode marking is kept, because the thickness counts as fine adjustment within the mode and is deliberately not compared when recognising it. created 18/07/2026
FIX Word cloud: the frame around the free area was of a different width on the left, the right, the top and the bottom. The cause was not the calculation — the free area sits exactly in the centre — but the trimming at the end: the finished cloud was cropped to the bounding box of the words actually placed. Where the words did not quite reach the edge on one side, everything shifted as a result. With a free area set, the whole area as set is now taken; the frame thickness therefore really does correspond to the cm set, on all four sides. created 18/07/2026
CHG Word cloud: the main term in a free area is set smaller — around 62 instead of 82 per cent of the area. It thereby keeps visible air around it to the word frame, instead of almost touching it. created 18/07/2026
NEW Word cloud: the main term can be set over several lines — a vertical bar separates them, so "Data|Feeling" for "Data" above "Feeling". The lines stand centred one below the other; in picture mode as a multi-line graphic, with native text boxes as paragraphs. This makes the stacked look of large word clouds possible as well. created 18/07/2026
CHG Word cloud: with a free area set, the maximum font size now follows the FRAME THICKNESS rather than the size of the area. Until now a single long word could take up more than 10 per cent of the frame area — one edge then consisted of two giant words and the opposite one of a dozen small ones, and the frame looked uneven even though it was geometrically the same width everywhere. The size relationships between the words are preserved. created 18/07/2026
CHG Word cloud: terms are shrunk more strongly rather than being left out — a word may now shrink to around 8 per cent of the largest font size (30 per cent before, after which it was dropped). Markedly more terms therefore land on the slide. created 18/07/2026
NEW Word cloud: the status line now also shows how many terms could NOT be placed — "62 of 100 words", say — and suggests concrete remedies where more than 5 per cent are dropped. Until now it showed nothing but the number set, and missing words went entirely unnoticed. created 18/07/2026
CHG Word cloud: the modes "Classic" and "Main term embedded" have been merged into one — they set the same settings and differed only in whether a main term was entered at the top. The tab now shows nine modes. created 18/07/2026
NEW Word cloud: five new gradients in the colour choice — blue/turquoise, violet/pink, orange/yellow, anthracite/mint and template accents. Every word stays a single colour, and its colour follows from its POSITION in the cloud; beside it, the direction of the gradient can be chosen (horizontal, vertical, diagonal, radial). It takes effect in both outputs, picture as well as native text boxes. created 18/07/2026
NEW Word cloud: a new colour entry "One colour (freely chosen)" — all the words in exactly one colour. The hex value stands in a field of its own, and the "…" button opens the colour dialog with the accent colours of the active design as custom colours. Until now the only choice was between multi-coloured palettes and single-colour gradations of brightness. created 18/07/2026
NEW Word cloud: the choice of typeface now covers ALL the fonts installed on the machine instead of nine fixed ones (323 families on the test system), sorted alphabetically, with Segoe UI preselected. Where a font lacks a bold or an italic cut, the next best is used automatically — GDI otherwise throws an exception there instead of substituting. created 18/07/2026
NEW Puzzle generator (ribbon "Tools"): creates real, interlocking puzzle pieces as native shapes. Four modes — grid (an empty puzzle in an object, the working area, the slide, or as a free grid with a chosen piece size), picture (cutting a selected picture into pieces), individual pieces (one or several with freely chosen edges) and words (one scattered, labelled piece per term). Edge shape (puzzle, all edges straight, tabs on the outside too), edge profile (organic, classic or pronounced), aspect ratios (original size depending on the style, 1:1, 4:3, 16:9), the same colour palettes and gradients as the word cloud (left-right, radial, diagonal and others; newly among them the "Office Theme" palette), border and 3D. Every piece can be labelled — the text sits centred horizontally and vertically. Existing puzzles can be selected, adjusted in the panel and updated. created 21/07/2026
NEW Puzzle: new "Ring" mode — interlocking segments as a ring or doughnut. The outer diameter, the ring width and the number of pieces can be set; optionally with numbers (centred in the segment) and callouts (a radial line plus a text box). The centre point is the object selected, otherwise the centre of the slide. created 23/07/2026
NEW Puzzle: new "Strip" mode — a chain of 2 to 7 pieces, optionally interlocked in one or two rows (two rows with a real horizontal seam in the middle). The outer edges are straight or, through a switch, open all the way round (with tabs and blanks). With two rows the numbering can be chosen (running through, in pairs by column, or per row); with one row the callouts sit below, above or alternating (zigzag, above first or below first), and with two rows automatically on the outside. Each piece has a number or a placeholder for an icon of your own centred on it. created 26/07/2026
NEW Puzzle: new fill type "Corner gradient" in the Style tab — pieces are given a diagonal gradient from a lightened corner to the full colour. The corner can be chosen freely (top left/right, bottom left/right or centre) or randomly, and directionally too (only to the right, say). "Gradient share" controls how many pieces receive a gradient at all. It works with every palette and every gradient. created 26/07/2026
NEW Puzzle, grid mode: the outer edges can now be opened individually per side — top, right, bottom and left separately closed (straight) or open (with tabs and blanks). Partly open puzzles are thereby possible too, not only fully closed or open all the way round. created 26/07/2026
NEW Puzzle: new option "Random edges" in the grid, picture, ring and strip modes — the tabs interlock sometimes one way, sometimes the other, so that every insertion looks different while staying cleanly interlocked. created 25/07/2026
NEW Puzzle presets in a "Presets" tab of their own: save, apply and delete complete structural and style settings under a name. A short summary shows what is in the chosen preset before you apply it. A preset is always a pure style/structure template (with no contents) and can therefore be applied to any puzzle; the settings last used are also remembered automatically (%AppData%\PPPTools\puzzle_presets.xml). created 26/07/2026
CHG The colour choice lists in all the tools (word cloud, puzzle, colour swatches, Venn) are now uniformly sorted alphabetically; fixed special entries stand at the top and the gradients form a block of their own below them. created 26/07/2026
NEW Colour swatches (ribbon "Tools"): shows the colours of every palette — the gradients and the accent colours of the active design included — as clickable squares. A click colours the selected objects (fill, border or text); if you wish, the palette can be inserted onto the slide as grouped sample squares (optionally with hex labels) and picked up with the PowerPoint eyedropper. Available in every version. created 23/07/2026
NEW Emoji picker (ribbon "Tools"): search the complete set of Microsoft Fluent emojis, or browse them in collapsible groups, and insert them onto the slide as losslessly scalable vector graphics (SVG). Three styles — Color, Flat and High Contrast — as well as six selectable skin tones for hands and people. Emojis used often can be remembered as favourites with a star (they then appear at the top). The size can be set. Free in every version. created 26/07/2026

Online help 1.0.153 18/07/2026

NEW Word cloud help: a new HTML viewer for the example data sets — the word list can be looked at, selected and copied to the clipboard at a click in a tab of its own, without the detour through the CSV file. A choice of all six data sets, with a direct link per data set from the table. created 18/07/2026
CHG Word cloud help: added that with a free area set, the whole area is filled rather than being cropped to the words. created 18/07/2026
CHG Word cloud help: the mode table produced afresh — the frame modes now use the frame thickness in cm, together with a note on where it is set. created 18/07/2026
CHG Word cloud help: a note that the active mode is highlighted and that the marking is derived from the settings. created 18/07/2026
CHG Word cloud help: with a band, the whole strip at that height stays free — made precise. created 18/07/2026
FIX Word cloud help: the frame thickness in cm documented; also corrected that the free area with "Selected shape" is rectangular — the earlier statement that the silhouette was taken over scaled down was wrong. created 18/07/2026
NEW Word cloud help: a new section "Mode" — ten layout variants, each with a schematic sketch and the settings it makes. created 18/07/2026
NEW Word cloud help: a section "Free area in the centre" with the recipe for the frame look; also made clear that "Outside the shape" only makes sense with a shape of your own selected. created 18/07/2026
NEW Word cloud help: a sixth example data set with 100 analytics terms — "DataFeeling" clearly ahead at the top, followed by technical terms from dashboard and KPI to clustering and GDPR. It is directly suited to trying out the main term. created 18/07/2026
NEW Word cloud help: five example data sets to download — the 100 largest capital cities, the 100 largest countries, 50 financial and cultural metropolises, the 26 cantons and the 16 German federal states. As CSV in the format "term;count", sorted in descending order and readable straight in through "Load file…". created 18/07/2026
NEW Word cloud help: the new "Placement" option for the main term documented (embedded · large in the centre · a band across the full width, plus the combination with the frame mode), and the 22nd colour palette added to the table. created 18/07/2026
NEW A new help page "Creating a Venn diagram" for the new Venn panel: 2 to 5 sets, a complete Venn as against a ring arrangement, texts and formats per area, templates, and the course of create / update / fetch the settings back from a selected diagram. It also explains why a complete Venn with circles is only possible up to 3 sets. created 18/07/2026

Online help 1.0.128 18/07/2026

NEW Word cloud help: a section of its own "Excluded words" — the exclusion holds for every form of input (for finished "term,count" lists as well), the text last entered is remembered, and named exclusion lists can be saved, loaded and deleted. created 18/07/2026
CHG Word cloud help: the two tabs "Data" and "Settings" described, and the section "Main term" put at the beginning of "Entering data" — to match the new order in the panel. created 18/07/2026
NEW Word cloud help: a section "Presets" for the tab of its own — the short summary, applying and deleting, and saving with or without "Incl. words" (the main term, the data and the excluded words). created 18/07/2026
CHG Backup help: the "Settings" area now covers the preset files as well (export presets, word cloud presets, exclusion lists) — the table and the ZIP structure extended accordingly. created 18/07/2026
NEW Word cloud help: a new section "Export words as CSV" (separator, encoding, the round trip through Excel); csv added to the file import. created 18/07/2026
NEW Word cloud help: the two design-derived colour entries "Template accent, single colour" and "Accent colour + grey" described — including a note on when a single-colour gradation works better than a colourful palette. created 18/07/2026
NEW Word cloud help: eight new colour palettes added to the overview, with a note on the rank-based assignment of the single-colour palettes and a legibility warning about "Deep blue & gold". created 18/07/2026
CHG Word cloud help: the colour palette table now shows the real colours as colour squares rather than merely a description — for all 21 palettes as well as the two entries derived from the design. created 18/07/2026
CHG Word cloud help: the colour table produced afresh after the darkening of "Deep blue & gold", the legibility warning removed and "Greyscale" added to the rank-based palettes. created 18/07/2026

Online help 1.0.116 18/07/2026

NEW A new help page "Creating a QR code": the code types (URL, text, vCard, Wi-Fi, email), error correction, colours and the template accent colours, output as a picture or as native shapes including the shape counts, a logo from a file, from the slide or from a snippet, together with three worked examples. created 18/07/2026
NEW A new help page "Producing a word cloud": entering data (a list of terms, continuous text, slides and notes, a file import of txt/docx/xlsx/pdf), the main term, shapes including a shape of your own that you have selected and the frame mode, density levels, font size modes, colour palettes and colours from a picture, filters, output as native text boxes or as a picture, together with four worked examples. created 18/07/2026

Website 1.4.91 14/07/2026

NEW Feature matrix and pricing page: "Export presentation" (PDF/PPTX/picture → file/email/clipboard, with sections, hidden slides and presets) added as a Pro function. created 14/07/2026

Online help 1.0.112 14/07/2026

NEW A new help page "Exporting a presentation": the choice of slides (all / a range / the selection / sections), hidden slides including zoom targets, the format PDF/PowerPoint/picture, the destination file/email/clipboard, file name placeholders and presets. created 14/07/2026

Online help 1.0.110 11/07/2026

NEW A new help page "Progress display (Progress)": long-running snippets now show an animated display with a cancel option — automatically, or with a real percentage bar through ppptools.Progress(...). With an example. created 11/07/2026

Online help 1.0.108 11/07/2026

NEW A new help page "Result dialog (ShowResult)": snippets can show a freely designed dialog with formatted text (bold, coloured, links) at the end — the number of elements processed and a list of errors, for instance. With a complete example. created 11/07/2026

Online help 1.0.107 11/07/2026

NEW A new help page "Theme colour parameter (@param themecolor)": a colour picker that offers the PPPTools custom colours (the brand palette) as tiles — including how it differs from @param color, and an example. created 11/07/2026

Online help 1.0.104 11/07/2026

NEW Two new help pages: "Line parameter (@param line)" (the border editor: colour, thickness, line style) and "Fill parameter (@param fill)" (solid / gradient / none) — each with examples including a combined shape style. created 11/07/2026

Online help 1.0.102 11/07/2026

NEW A new example page "Replacing a snippet by name": a complete snippet that finds shapes through their technical name and replaces them through the snippet picker (exchanging a customer logo across every slide, for instance). created 11/07/2026

Online help 1.0.101 11/07/2026

NEW New help pages for the Advanced Snippet Editor: "Snippet parameter (@param snippet)" (the snippet picker with a preview, finding and replacing a logo by name) and "Find & replace a colour" (an example of recolouring across an area with a tolerance). created 11/07/2026

Online help 1.0.100 11/07/2026

NEW The help page "Font parameter (@param font)" extended: a new section "Combining font and colour" — the font selection deliberately brings no colour with it, which is set separately through @param color (with a complete example). created 11/07/2026

Add-in 1.1.0.6 08/07/2026

NEW New "Versions & changes" panel: an overview of all the components plus the changelog from the server feed. created 06/07/2026
CHG The note about what is new is now a badge on the menu instead of an automatic jump at start-up. created 06/07/2026
FIX Versions panel: labels were cut off, the title overlapped the text, font sizes were inconsistent — fixed (DPI-safe layout). created 06/07/2026
FIX The installed version now shows the real number in a local build instead of 1.0.0.0. created 06/07/2026
CHG Licence panel: the duplicate portal link has been removed (only one link now, which adapts to the licence status). created 06/07/2026
CHG Bulk editing in the Manage managers extended: the author and (with snippets) the technical name and grouping can now be changed for several objects together. created 08/07/2026

Website 1.4.65 08/07/2026

NEW A new page "Terms of use & disclaimer"; the download now requires active consent (use at your own risk). created 08/07/2026

Online help 1.0.96 06/07/2026

NEW A new page on versioning and the change log added. created 04/07/2026

Add-in 1.1.0.5 03/07/2026

CHG With no valid licence the manager now always opens the licence panel instead of the version information. created 03/07/2026
FIX The change log in the versions panel is no longer cut off (the height adapts dynamically). created 03/07/2026
FIX The licence panel was built once too often at start-up with no licence — fixed. created 03/07/2026

Add-in 1.1.0.3 02/07/2026

NEW New setup and auto-update system (ClickOnce through the website). created 02/07/2026
NEW Versions panel in the settings: shows the installed version, the server version and the change log of the new version. created 02/07/2026
NEW At start-up the add-in reports a newer version automatically. created 02/07/2026

Versions & change log

Changes in detail