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Section names, slide titles and the outline: what a PowerPoint file says about how it was put together

Last updated: 28 October 2026

This page is for people who send a deck that was built by a team, reused from an earlier pitch, or organised for their own use: sections called after the people who own them, a section of slides for one client kept in a deck sent to another, slide titles that only the speaker was meant to read. It is about the names and titles that describe the deck. The hidden slides themselves, speaker notes and comments are in speaker notes, hidden slides and comments, and what the layouts and masters keep is in templates and master slides.

Where the structure is kept

Section names

Microsoft's page Organize your PowerPoint slides into sections says: "Much like you use folders to organize your files, you can use sections to organize your slides into meaningful groups." It suggests uses that lead straight to names worth checking: "You can assign each colleague a section to make slide ownership clear during collaboration. And if you're starting with a blank slate, you can use sections to outline your presentation." It also says: "The names you enter appear as headers above each section, followed by the number of slides in each section in parentheses."

So a section can be called after the person who owns it, the client a group of slides was written for, or a working state such as "old pricing" or "not approved". The names are in the file: Microsoft's file format documentation, quoted on the Open XML SDK page for the section element, gives each section a name attribute that "specifies the name of the section", and a list of the slides it holds. Whoever opens the deck in Normal view or Slide Sorter sees them above the thumbnails.

To change one, Microsoft's page says: "In Normal view or Slide Sorter view, double-click the section name and enter a new name in the Section Name box." Rename sections to plain descriptions of their content before you send the deck, or remove the sections if the reader does not need them.

Slide titles, in the outline and out of sight

Microsoft's page Create and print a presentation in Outline view says: "Outline view in PowerPoint displays your presentation as an outline made up of the titles and main text from each slide." The same page shows how to print the outline (File › Print, then Outline under Print Layout). Titles are also how people using a screen reader move through a deck. Microsoft's page Make your PowerPoint presentations accessible to people with disabilities recommends "a unique, descriptive title on each slide, even if it isn't visible", and says: "You can position a title off the slide. That way, the slide has a title for accessibility, but you save space on the slide for other content."

That is good practice, and it means a slide's title is not always the words on the slide. A title moved off the slide when the deck was written for one audience can still say "Pricing for [client]" after the visible text has been changed for the next. Read the titles in Outline view, or look at the edge of each slide in Normal view, before the deck goes out.

A hidden slide keeps its title too, because the slide stays in the file (see hidden slides). Microsoft's page Hide or show a slide also shows that, during a slide show, See All Slides switches "to a thumbnail list of all the slides in the presentation" and lets the presenter pick a hidden slide, so a hidden slide can appear on a shared screen as well as in the file.

The list of titles in the document properties

The extended properties part, docProps/app.xml, can carry a list called TitlesOfParts with a heading list, HeadingPairs, that says how many entries belong to each group. The standard, as quoted on the Open XML SDK page for TitlesOfParts, says: "This element specifies the title of each document. These parts are not document parts but conceptual representations of document sections." Microsoft's implementation note on TitlesOfParts gives the example of a presentation of three slides with a theme: the list holds the theme's name and one entry for each slide, under the headings "Theme" and "Slide Titles". The example's entries read "Slide 1" to "Slide 3".

Neither page says which text PowerPoint writes there for a given slide, so open docProps/app.xml in a copy of your own file and read the list. Microsoft's Document Inspector page describes the properties it removes as those on the Summary, Statistics and Custom tabs of the Document Properties dialog box, and does not mention this list, so do not assume that removing properties in PowerPoint clears it; look at docProps/app.xml again afterwards.

Document Inspector

Microsoft's page Remove hidden data and personal information by inspecting documents, presentations, or workbooks lists what Document Inspector finds and removes in PowerPoint (the list is set out in speaker notes, hidden slides and comments). Sections and slide titles are not on it, so renaming sections and checking titles is a job for you. Its off-slide check covers content outside the slide area, which can include a title moved off the slide on purpose, so look at what it found before you remove it; the page adds that it "does not detect or remove off-slide objects with animation effects".

How to check a deck

1. Open the deck in Normal view and read the section names above the thumbnails. In View › Slide Sorter, check which slides each section holds.
2. Switch to View › Outline and read every slide's title and main text. Then look at the area around each slide in Normal view for titles placed off it.
3. Look for hidden slides (a slash through the slide number in the thumbnail pane) and read their titles and content; delete the ones that should not go out.
4. For a closer look, make a copy, rename it from .pptx to .zip and unzip it. In ppt/presentation.xml, search for p14:section and read each name. In docProps/app.xml, read TitlesOfParts.
5. Finding nothing this way shows only that these searches found nothing; the notes, comments, masters and other parts are covered by the pages linked above.

What ScrubDrop does

ScrubDrop reads the .pptx in your browser; the file is not uploaded. It does not list or remove section names, in either version: rename or remove sections in PowerPoint before you check the file. The titles of visible slides are part of the slides and are kept as they are.

For free, one file at a time, it lists hidden slides and objects outside the slide, with short samples, and removes document properties and comments; removing the document properties takes the list of titles in docProps/app.xml with them. Pro also drops that list when it removes hidden slides, even if you keep the properties. ScrubDrop Pro also removes hidden slides, with their titles, and takes them out of the section lists; a section keeps its name even if the only slides it held were hidden ones. Pro can also remove objects outside the slide, and a title you moved off the slide for screen readers counts as one: leave that category unticked if you want to keep those titles, and remove other off-slide objects in PowerPoint. If a placeholder, such as the title, is moved off the slide on a layout or master, ScrubDrop refuses to remove objects outside the slide and says so, because every slide that uses the layout inherits that position. Removing hidden slides can also be refused, for example when a visible slide has a Zoom to a hidden one; the message says what to change in PowerPoint first. The result is read again with separate parsers, and a file that does not pass is not offered.

Questions

Sources: the Microsoft pages linked on this page were checked on 28 October 2026. ScrubDrop is not affiliated with Microsoft.