I often work in PowerPoint to give presentations off my Mac. But I have a constant issue on my new and also on my old Mac. When I’m in presentation mode then powerpoint suddenly just shifts to another slide even though I have haven’t clicked anything.
I just installed my Mac from scratch and thus also Powerpoint so I’m really not sure what is at stake here… Can anyone help? There must be a setting for this somewhere 
It sounds like timings have been applied to the presentation.
Open a presentation that has this issue. Then choose Slide Show tab --> Set Up – is the “Use Timings” checkbox checked? If so, uncheck it.
This setting travels with the presentation, so re-instaling the software won’t change it.
Thanks, I just opened a random powerpoint and it had the setting on… so I probably had it on when creating ALL my powerpoints (I have about 150) so that means it’s on for every one of those 
I’m not very adept at automation, but perhaps there’s a way you can automate changing the setting?
You might also try converting them to Keynote (or just viewing and displaying them in Keynote). You can export a slideshow with timings, but I don’t think Keynote has timings when you play a presentation within the Keynote app.
I left PPT a few years ago and have little interest in going back. The recent versions of Keynote almost always play PPT presentations flawlessly. I sometimes have to adjust font sizes, but that’s about it.
You might want to give this a try.
I have to use powerpoint due to work, so that’s not really an option for me. For the same reasons I don’t have the iWork suite installed at all