How to insert PowerPoint icons in Office 365

Office 365 keeps updating and every few weeks we notice a few new features. Sometimes it’s small things, but sometimes they’re pretty significant updates, and, as always with Microsoft, hidden away. This update features icons, with a selection of PowerPoint icons for presentations now built into PowerPoint itself.

You could think of it as ClipArt 2: The Icon Rises, I suppose, as there’s potential for this to become the fodder for badly designed slides with loads of things thrown in there. But when used correctly, icons are great to help you create clear, well designed slides.

Watch the video below for a detailed how-to, or read the article below for more hints and tips!

PowerPoint icons

How does it work? Well, head on over to the Insert tab on the ribbon where you’ll now find the Icons button, between Shapes and 3D Models. Click that and you’ll be shown a whole load of icons that you can choose from.

The list of icons is fairly extensive, with categories of icons for people, technology and electronics, communication, business, analytics, commerce, education, arts, celebration, faces, signs and symbols, arrows, interface, nature and outdoors, animals, food and drinks, weather and seasons, location, vehicles, buildings, sports, security and justice, medical, tools and building, home, and apparel. So you’ll probably find something useful in there.

Once you’ve chosen your icon, rather excitingly, a new tab appears! I do love a new tab. This one’s called Graphic Tools Format. Sadly, there’s not actually much to get excited about. Mostly, it’s the same formatting choices that you have for any PowerPoint shape, with colours, and effects. Interestingly (to me at least) PowerPoint seems to be treating icons as a mix of standard shapes (things like changing the fill colours and line colours, and altering the graphic effects), but also images, as there is an option to change the graphic for another one in the library or another file, just like you can with pictures. And you can crop graphics, like you can with images (but not with shapes). You can also convert your icon into PowerPoint shapes, but as the majority of PowerPoint icons in the library are either a single shape, or possibly two, there’s not much advantage to doing so. And other than these few categorization quirks, there’s nothing really new.

PowerPoint icons for presentations

It seems straightforward, but with icons, you can have a big impact on your slides. Let’s take this as an example:

Pretty terrible really. But sadly, a typical slide that’s abusing audiences all over the world. There are three quick design tips you can use to make this significantly better. We’ve gone into detail about it here, but for loyal Carbonites who already know and love that post, to summarize the points:

1. First, get rid of the harsh white background by putting a picture in there to give it some richness.
2. Second, reduce the amount of text to a few words for each point, and put each short phrase into a semi-transparent box, then neatly line them up.
3. And third, use icons to represent each of the phrases, to help give the audience some initial context and help them link to your content.

Previously, finding PowerPoint icons to do this could be a bit of a drag, but now, you can easily find the right icon for the job.

Free PowerPoint icons

What’s more, if you go to any of the many stock icon libraries, such as Creative Market, Flat Icon, The Noun Project, and Illustrio, you can download plenty of free PowerPoint icons and other graphics to choose from (and even more premium ones for a modest fee). Typically, you’ll find them in SVG formats (or Scalable Vector Graphics), which were somewhat difficult to deal with previously. Now, find the icon sets that you like, drag the relevant SVG icon file into PowerPoint, and use the same Graphics Tools Format tab to open up these files as editable PowerPoint icons.

PowerPoint 2013 icons

If you don’t have Office 365, then sorry, these functions aren’t available. But I happen to know a great presentation design agency that would be delighted to help you create beautiful and effective visual presentation content. And there’s loads of free PowerPoint stuff for you at our resources page too. So all is not lost, and you can still make some great slides.

There are other options if you have PowerPoint 2013. You could use an icon font, type out all the characters, then copy the text box, and using Paste Special on the Home tab, paste them as a Picture (Enhance Metafile). Then draw a box around the pasted icons, select both and in the Format tab, under Merge Shapes, choose Fragment. This will break everything up into it’s individual components and give you editable PowerPoint icons.

PowerPoint 2010 icons

Or for everyone else, vector graphics in EMF format should work by dragging them into PowerPoint, then choosing to ungroup once (Ctrl + Shift + G), to convert it into a Microsoft drawing object, and then ungrouping again to actually break it apart. You’ll probably need to do a bit of formatting to tidy things up though, and, to be honest, it’s often tricky to find online resources that give you EMF files. Up until 2017 it was easier, but Microsoft updated PowerPoint to no longer accept EPS files – another common form of vector files – due to security concerns. Another option is just to use images instead. Many of the sites give you transparent background PNG files to download, and with most of the sites suggested above, you can change the colour and style of the icon before downloading it, so that may be the best option. Or, take the opportunity to update to Office 365 (Microsoft’s cunning plan all along). In the meantime, check out the free PowerPoint icons we have in our awesome presentation toolkit.