It's faily easy to copy color palette from one excel file to another. First you need to have both files opened. Go to "Tools" > "Options" > "Color", look for the "Copy colors from" menu at the bottom, then select the xls file with source color palette and click ok.

Should you need to remove leading spaces from whole table or a selection of cells. Simply highlight required cells, press center align and revert to original alignment.

Adding superscript number as footnotes in Excel chart will just appear as normal text. If you only have no more than 3 footnotes. This problem can be resolved easily by insert special characters:

If footnotes more than 3, try adding them by using text box.

If you find any charts being distorted between copy and paste. Try to duplicate the chart while getting rid of the chart placeholder and paste again.

When your presentation file size became too big and you want to decrease it. Try the following method before compressing any pictures:

Make a backup of your presentation and go to slide sorter. Select all the slides, cut and save. Paste all the slides back in and save again. You will notice now the file size became smaller.

To maintain consistency in your PowerPoint presentation, please review the following check list:

• Display drawing guides on screen during check

• Font size of all slide titles must be consistent, reapply slide layout or shorten long title when
  necessary

• Font size of chart labels are consistent and not smaller than 7 points

• If you are using shading for chart/text headings, make sure they appear the same size and aligned
  properly

• Double check bullets, adjust non-aligned points

• Charts are not being distorted and using the color scheme correctly when making changes

• Grayscale view must be good, just in case you need to print in b/w

When you insert or paste vector graphics into PowerPoint it will ends up looking jagged at times. To fix this issue, try to enlarge vector graphics 2–3 times bigger then export/paste as enhanced metafile again. Also make sure to ungroup the graphic after pasted into PowerPoint, which will make it look smoother when projecting on screen.

You can change the fonts for entire presentation easily by using "Replace fonts".  It works with text boxes, tables, master slides, but for graphs and other embedded objects, you still need to do it manually.

For Office 2003: Click Format > Replace Fonts... then select the original font and the font you want to replace with.

For Office 2007: From the Editing menu under Home tab, click Replace > Replace Fonts...

Always keep the font size of the graph not smaller than 8 pt to avoid distortion.

You can quickly make a copy of any objects easily by holding down the CTRL key while you drag on the object. Holding CTRL and Shift at the same time can make duplicate object align with the original one as well.

To manually adjust size of text box instead of Auto-fit:

For PowerPoint 2007 user:

Right click on text box and select “Format Shape”,  go to “Text Box” tab and check “Do not Autofit”

For PowerPoint 2003 user:

Double click on text box and go to “Text Box” tab, uncheck “Resize AutoShape to fit text”
 

By pressing Alt key with Unicode you can quickly insert different kinds of special characters. For example:

You can also use windows character map tool to look for symbol you need:

1. From the Start menu, select Run (or press Windows Key+R then enter).

2. In the Run dialog box, type charmap.

3. Click OK.

After downloading PowerPoint templates, you should save the file as .pot format and keep them where PowerPoint can find them:

For Windows Vista and PowerPoint 2007 user:

C:\Users\[User Name]\AppData\Roaming\Microsoft\Templates

For Windows XP and PowerPoint 2003 user:

C:\Documents and Settings\[User Name]\Application Data\Microsoft\Templates