Inconsistent delete behaviour between Word, Powerpoint apps vs online (OneDrive / SharePoint)

Question

Inconsistent delete behaviour between Word, Powerpoint apps vs online (OneDrive / SharePoint)

Brown, Eran 20

On Mac, using the Option (⌥+⌫) to delete a word has incosistent behaviour:

Application	Local app / Web?	Space left	resulting behavior
Word	Local mac app	Yes	You can keep typing
Word	Web (OneDrive)	Yes	You can keep typing
PowerPoint	Local mac app	No❌	typing creates an typo ❌
PowerPoint	Web (OneDrive)	Yes ✅	You can keep typing
Outlook	Local mac app	Yes	You can keep typing

Brown, Eran 20 Reputation points

2026-05-08T15:29:36.81+00:00

Answer is not helpful -
PowerPoint does delete the word, but it removes the space before it (unlike Word, SharePoint or powerPoint online.)
That creates inconsistent UX and leads to user to start typing without a space, which creates a typo.
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4 answers

Your answer

Brown, Eran 20 Reputation points

2026-05-08T15:29:36.81+00:00

Answer is not helpful -
PowerPoint does delete the word, but it removes the space before it (unlike Word, SharePoint or powerPoint online.)
That creates inconsistent UX and leads to user to start typing without a space, which creates a typo.
Deleted

This comment has been deleted due to a violation of our Code of Conduct. The comment was manually reported or identified through automated detection before action was taken. Please refer to our Code of Conduct for more information.

Answer 1

The behavior difference comes from how the shortcut is defined in each app/platform, not from a bug in OneDrive/SharePoint.

From the documented shortcuts:

In PowerPoint for Mac (desktop app), deleting one word to the left uses ⌘+Delete, not ⌥+Delete. The documented mapping is:
- Delete one character to the left: Delete
- Delete one word to the left: ⌘+Delete
- Delete one character to the right: Fn+Delete
- Delete one word to the right: ⌘+Fn+Delete
In Word for the web, word-level deletion is handled differently and relies on browser/OS behavior plus the app’s own key handling. The web app’s documented shortcuts focus on character-level delete/backspace and navigation; word-level delete via modifiers is not standardized the same way as in the desktop apps.

Because of this, using ⌥+Delete in the Mac desktop PowerPoint app is not a supported “delete word” shortcut and can lead to the inconsistent behavior being observed (for example, partial deletion or leaving the caret in an unexpected position, which then makes continued typing look like a typo). In contrast, Word (desktop and web) and Outlook for Mac align better with macOS text-editing conventions, so ⌥+Delete behaves more as expected.

To get consistent behavior in PowerPoint for Mac when deleting whole words, use the officially supported shortcut ⌘+Delete instead of ⌥+Delete.

References:

Answer 2

Bob Jones AKA CyberTaz MVP 437.7K

As the Q&A Assist bot indicated, these are the Delete kybd shortcuts supported in Mac PPt:

User's image

These along with others is available in PPt by going to Help> PowerPoint Help in the main menu then entering keyboard shortcuts in the search field.

Mac Word supports both Command+delete & Option+delete but the former is the one originally assigned on a Mac. The latter was added to Mac Word more recently as a concession to Windows converts but the additional option wasn't added to PPt.

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Answer 3

Brown, Eran 20

The same behavior persists with ⌘+⌫

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Answer 4

Bob Jones AKA CyberTaz MVP 437.7K

Don't hesitate ot use Help> Feedback in the PPt menu bar or visit PowerPoint · Feedback to submit a feature request.

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