Getting rid of Noto Sans Symbols and other fonts in Powerpoint

If someone worked on your PowerPoint presentation using Google presentations, you can end up in a situation that PowerPoint gives an error when saving the presentation that the a font (like Noto Sans Symbols) cannot be found.

Getting rid of this is not easy. Find and replace fonts often does not solve the problem for me.

Solution that did work: 

1. save the Powerpoint as an XML file
2. Open in a plain text editor (Notepad++, ...)
   
3. find an replace "Noto Sans Symbols" (or the font mentioned in the error when saving) with something like "Arial"
4. save again
5. Open the XML file with PowerPoint
6. Save again as .pptx
7. phew!

I found the solution here...

MS Teams integrates PowerPoint

When sharing content in Microsoft Teams, the pane to choose the screen/window to share has now moved to the right (was bottom), on my version (1.4.00.1116). 

In the pane a new option PowerPoint Live has been added. 

It opens slides directly in presenter view in teams, while attendees see the presentation itself. Attendees can even (individually) browse to other pages, if you allow them to.

Great addition, and more features are coming. Here's a Microsoft article on this, but take care: all features discussed have not been rolled out yet at the time of this writing.

Most annoying problem is that it does not remember which presentations you loaded from your local machine, so you have to reload them every time you leave the presentation to share your screen.

Powerpoint zoom notes text

Sometimes I work in a powerpoint where the text in the notes view is too small or too big.
Setting the font size does nothing.
Moving the zoom slider does nothing (I wish Microsoft would fix this).

The solution: while positioning your cursor in the notes pane, you have to select the View > Zoom menu, that one works.

Saving powerpoint as PDF loses image transparency (solved)

When you save a powerpoint as PDF, transparent parts of images (e.g. png) appear as black regions in the PDF.
The solution?

1. When in the Save as... diaglog you select Browse, an explorer window pops up
2. Choose Save as type: PDF (*.pdf)  
3. An Options... button appears. Click this button.
   
4.  At the bottom of the window uncheck PDF/A compliant

Your preference will be saved with the document, so next time you don't have to go through this again.