PowerPoint is slowly adding features that have been standard in Photoshop for years. One useful one is the image blur filter to increase depth of field of your photos (earlier post). It adds some extra realism to this composite image trick (discussed earlier here and here)

Find an image for the foreground and use the PowerPoint format/remove-background function to get rid of the white background
Find a background (nice image of Cafe de Flore by DarkB4Dwan)
Combine the 2 images
Blur the background with (click the image, format, artistic effects, the right one in the 2nd row)

One other application is to repeat a blurred version of a busy chart for additional comments (see post here)