Two new slide types for reading the room, a rebuilt PowerPoint add-in, and a run of updates to where your work lives, who you share it with and how it looks.
You finish a session, you ask “how did that go?”, and the two people nearest the front answer for everyone. Everyone else nods, packs up, and takes their real opinion home with them. You leave with a feeling, not a picture.
A lot of this month is about getting that picture: hearing from the whole room, not the loudest corner. The rest is about the quieter parts of your week, the bit before the session where you are in PowerPoint, digging through files, or waiting on a colleague to review your deck.
This month’s highlights
Radar: everyone rates the same few things from their phone, and the room’s answer draws itself as a spider chart.
PowerPoint add-in: rebuilt from the ground up. Pick one slide, a handful, or all of them, and add them to your deck in one go.
Radar: see how the whole room rates it
Radar started with one post. A presenter who has run live polls with his audiences for close to ten years wrote on LinkedIn that the radar chart he relied on was gone from the tool he used, and that the replacement “doesn’t come close to telling the same story.” Dave on our team read it, and the team built Radar.
He had a point. Some questions don’t have one answer. “How is the team doing?” is really five questions: communication, workload, clarity, trust, energy. A single poll flattens all of that into one number.
What it feels like: you pick a handful of things to rate, everyone scores them on their phone, and a spider chart builds on screen as the averages come in. The shape tells the story before anyone says a word.
What’s new: add between 3 and 8 dimensions, type your own or let AI suggest them, and choose a 1–5, 1–10 or 0–100 scale. You can overlay up to 3 subjects on the same chart to compare them side by side: this quarter and last, two product ideas, or three teams. It’s available on every plan, including free.
Why I think you’ll love it: it gives the quiet people a way to say “workload is a 2” without raising their hand. Use it for team health checks, retrospectives, end-of-session reviews, product feedback, or a skills self-assessment at the start and end of a programme.
Help Centre article: Use the Radar slide
PowerPoint add-in: one slide, a few, or all of them
For those of you who live in PowerPoint, this one’s for you.
Back in March, a university lecturer who teaches with AhaSlides inside PowerPoint wrote to us with a simple ask. The add-in gave two choices: one slide, or the whole presentation. The lecturer wanted slides 4 to 9. Since then we have heard the same thing in different words: a 38-question trivia round added one slide at a time, and a trainer re-loading every slide individually the morning of a session.
What it feels like: you insert the add-in once, tick the slides you want, and they land in your deck together. One slide, a handful, or the whole lot. When you want to edit or add more later, it opens in its own popup window instead of sending you off somewhere else and back again.
What’s new: the add-in has been redesigned from the ground up. Select a presentation and every slide gets a tick box. Tick the ones you want, or click Select all, then click Add slides (it shows how many you picked, for example Add 3 slides). The first one goes on your current PowerPoint slide and each of the others gets its own new slide right after it, in order. Editing and adding slides later happens in a popup, so you spend less time navigating and more time on the deck itself.
Why I think you’ll love it: a 20-question quiz used to mean repeating the same steps 20 times. Now it is one pass. The night before a session is not when you want to fight a sidebar, and if your deck already lives in PowerPoint, you can drop in the exact polls and quizzes you need and keep your train of thought.
Good to know: a few versions of PowerPoint can’t insert several slides at once, such as PowerPoint on iPad and volume-licensed versions like Office 2024 LTSC. There, the add-in keeps its older view, where you add one slide or the whole presentation.
Help Centre article: Using PowerPoint’s AhaSlides Add-in
Rather present from AhaSlides? Sync with OneDrive, now for everyone
Not everyone wants to run their session from inside PowerPoint. If your deck lives in OneDrive, you can import it into AhaSlides and keep it connected. When the deck changes, update it in AhaSlides, edit it at the source, or disconnect it whenever you like.
Why I think you’ll love it: no more exporting, re-uploading and tidying up duplicates every time you fix a typo in PowerPoint. You keep editing where you’re comfortable, and the version you present is the one you meant to.
Help Centre article: Import and sync slides from cloud storage
Two PowerPoint masterclasses with Training Magazine Network
If PowerPoint is where your sessions start, two of the people who know it best spent an hour each with Training Magazine Network this month, and we were proud to sponsor both.
Bland to Grand PPT Slide Design Makeover
Mike Parkinson, Billion Dollar Graphics
18 September
Practical ways to spark ideas, add simple design touches, and turn a tired slide into one people want to look at. Mike ran his audience activities with AhaSlides from inside his PowerPoint deck.
Telling Magical Stories with PowerPoint
Rick Altman, host of the Presentation Summit
25 September
How Animation and Morph can sequence complex ideas so an audience follows them step by step and remembers them.
More than 3,000 people registered across the two sessions. If you missed them, both recordings are free on Training Magazine Network once you sign in. Thank you, Mike and Rick, and thank you to everyone who joined and played along.
Fill in the Blanks: mind the gap
Write a sentence, take out the words that matter, and let the room put them back.
What it feels like: nobody needs instructions. People see a sentence with gaps and start filling them in from their phones, by typing or picking from a dropdown. Then you reveal the full sentence and the leaderboard.
What’s new: blank out up to 4 words per sentence. Answers are scored automatically, partial credit is on by default, and every answer is saved for you to look at later.
Why I think you’ll love it: recall is where learning sticks, and this is recall without the pressure of a blank page. Use it for key terms, a process in the right order of words, a policy line people should know by heart, or a quick check of what landed from the last module.
Help Centre article: Use the Fill in the Blanks slide
Your work, easier to find and easier to share
If you prepare sessions with other people, or just have a lot of them, this pair of updates is for you.
- A new home: My Files. Your presentations and surveys now live together in one workspace. Organise them in folders, use bulk actions, sort, switch between grid and list view, and find anything people have shared with you under Shared with me. My Files: your AhaSlides workspace
- Build surveys together. You can now invite collaborators to a survey, so a colleague can help write the questions or check them before it goes out. Shared surveys show up under Shared with me.
Why this matters: the session is the part people see, but the hours before it are where most of the work happens. Less hunting and fewer “can you send me the latest version?” messages means more of that time goes into the content.
Photo Share: easier to set up, easier to keep
The photos your audience shares are often the best record of the day. Now they are easier to plan for and to hold on to.
- Upload your own images from the editor and manage them in a gallery view in the Content settings panel, so the wall isn’t empty when people first look up.
- Preview the slideshow with a sample before you present, so you know what the room will see.
- Download what your audience shared. Open the report, go to the Slides tab, scroll to the Photo Share slide and click Download Photo. Large sets can take a little while, so give it a moment.
Help Centre article: Use the Photo Share slide
Smaller things that make the day easier
- New themes, cleaner previews. There are new official themes in the gallery, and theme thumbnails no longer show the AhaSlides logo, so you see the design itself (your custom logo still shows). When you create a theme, you can now preview it in Participant view as well as Presenter view. Create and apply presentation themes
- Survey themes that match. The theme list in the survey editor now matches the presentation editor, and you can hover over a thumbnail to preview it.
- Audio, where you reach for it. You told us the Play button was hard to find mid-session, so it now sits in the top bar of the presenting screen. Audio settings stay in the Audio tab in the editor, and you can add audio to Content slides again. Add slide audio and sound effects
Training Magazine Network Choice Award 2026
AhaSlides has been named a winner in the Gamification & Game-Based Learning category of the Training Magazine Network Choice Awards 2026. What makes this one special is who picked us: the people who run training sessions for a living.
The Choice Awards are crowd-sourced. There is no judging panel behind closed doors: winners are chosen by the votes of Training Magazine Network’s 100,000+ members, the trainers, instructional designers, learners and L&D leaders who use these tools every day. This year, 2,207 voters cast 11,692 votes for 296 companies across seven categories.
Our answer to a room that drifts is to make participation the default, with more than 30 ready-made interactive activities a trainer can drop into a session and facilitate straight away. And there is more to come: Escape Room, a new training game that started as the winning entry at our September hackathon, ships to all AhaSlides users in October 2026.
Thank you to everyone who voted. This one belongs to the trainers and facilitators who use AhaSlides in their sessions.
Read more: AhaSlides wins a 2026 Training Magazine Network Choice Award for gamification
Every one of these came from watching how you present and listening to what you told us. Radar started with one LinkedIn post, and the new PowerPoint add-in started with one lecturer asking for slides 4 to 9. So if there is something you wish AhaSlides did but does not yet, tell me. I read these.
Here’s to your next full room,
Cheryl
Head of Growth, AhaSlides