Microsoft Answers: The PowerPoint Support Forum (and the former PowerPoint newsgroup, etc.)
There's a group of friendly people who'll answer your questions and help solve your PowerPoint problems. All you need to do is ask.
Politely, please. For the most part, they're volunteers, not Microsoft employees. Rudeness is probably the best way to get yourself ignored. 'Nuff said?
Where can I find them?
Visit the PowerPoint section of the Microsoft Answers forum
Click here to view only questions that have been marked as ANSWERED
Click here to view only questions that are as yet UNANSWERED
Click here to view ALL PowerPoint questions, ANSWERED or UNANSWERED
Anyone can read the questions and answers there but to ask or answer questions, you'll need to be using a supported browser and you'll need to sign in using a valid LiveID (aka Net Passport). If you don't have one, you can create one from the sign-in page.
It's a good idea to sign in anyhow; a bug in the forum software sometimes prevents you from seeing more than a handful of questions if you're not signed in. So sign in, refresh the page if need be, and you're good to go.
As yet, these forums aren't well indexed by the major search engines but try typing this into Google or Bing:
Microsoft Answers xxx yyy zzz
where xxx, yyy and zzz are your search terms. It doesn't work all that well but it's a start.
What about the old newsgroup?
Microsoft killed it in June of 2010.
For those users who prefer to use an NNTP (newsgroup) reader to participate in the support community, MS developed a partial solution called the NNTP Bridge. This allows us to connect supported NNTP readers to the web forums.
But that only worked with the old Answers forum. The new Answers 2 forum that launched in late February of 2011 no longer supports NNTP access, at least for now. MS understands the importance of it to some people and is looking into the possibilty of re-enabling it.
You can find instructions on how to download and set up the NNTP Bridge here
Regular newsgroup users report that Jochen Kalmbach's Community Forums NNTP bridge is a superior solution.
Looking for information from the old newsgroups? Tech Archive has posts dating back to 2004.
You can also search the Google Groups PowerPoint archive
What about Macintosh PowerPoint newsgroups
But if you need to use a browser instead, Mac users can click here
As with the Windows PowerPoint group, the web view is frequently broken, so for now we can't recommend using it.
Instead, use Google Groups: http://groups.google.com/group/microsoft.public.mac.office.powerpoint/topics.
Improve your odds of getting questions answered
See Guidelines for the PowerPoint Newsgroup to learn how to ask support questions in a way that's likely to produce fast, accurate answers.