Microsoft is leaning in on the power of artificial intelligence to help Office 365 subscribers create beautiful PowerPoint slides. By dragging and dropping in your favorite images and the relevant text to a slide, PowerPoint Designer leverages A.I. To automatically suggest compelling themes, layouts, and designs for you to use. In addition, A.I. Can be called upon to help presenters make big numbers in a slide more relatable, and artificial intelligence can also help coach you in becoming a better speaker. These new A.I. Tools follow the recent addition of for PowerPoint.“We noticed that people were spending too much time building presentations, too much time on slides, and they weren’t having the impact that they wanted,” Shawn Villaron, Partner Group Program Manager at Microsoft, said in a video briefing.
![](/uploads/1/2/6/6/126619550/460585569.jpg)
“So we started with a hypothesis that we could actually do better — we could use artificial intelligence to find ways to make it easier for people to make highly impactful, highly effective presentations.” Building smarter slidesMicrosoft studied how people used PowerPoint, and the company discovered that most users start building a slide with a photo. By simply adding a feature to the slide, PowerPoint Designer will analyze the photo and “suggest seven or eight ways that the slide could be built,” Villaron said.After the text and visuals are added to a blank slide, PowerPoint Design will display a “Design Ideas” panel on the right-hand side, showing the possible visual layouts. Designer also can create a photo mosaic with multiple photos on the same slide, suggest effective text layout, or even build a timeline if it detects a sequence of events on the slide.“Over time, we add new capabilities around looking for iconography and adding iconography to your slide to increase the effectiveness increase the impact fullness of your slides,” Villaron added.Not only does PowerPoint Designer help you create a visually compelling way to tell your story, but Microsoft claims that it could save most users at least 30 seconds per slide and as much as five minutes. Additionally, with the powerful A.I.-based slide suggestions, Microsoft stated that it has reached a major milestone with PowerPoint Designer with users having saved and kept more than 1 billion slides suggested by the A.I.-based tool.For organizations using PowerPoint, Designer even works with branded templates, allowing users to create slides that adhere to visual identity guidelines. Make numbers great againIn addition to being able to build visually pleasing slide layouts, Designer even understands context, which can help you tell your story in a more meaningful way. While it’s important, for example, to tell your audience that sea turtles have to travel 1,500 miles just to lay their eggs, such a large number can be lost without context.
Here is a #TipThursday request from someone on YouTube - I just upgraded my PowerPoint for Mac to the latest release. Insert one or more pictures, a list of items, or a list of dates. To insert a picture, select Insert Pictures and choose the picture you want. Select the design you want. You can also bring up Designer by selecting a picture, and then selecting Design Design Ideas.
Fortunately, PowerPoint’s A.I. Tool can help add some meaning to that many miles.
Within the same “Design Ideas” pane, PowerPoint Designer can also add that this distance is “about half the width of the United States.“Through the addition of perspective, Designer can help make these numerical slides more digestible and help presenters to more effectively convey their information,” Derek Johnson, a PowerPoint manager, said in a demo, noting that the relatable references help make the information easier to understand and increases retention. “You’ll see this kind of perspective show up on all sorts of measures ranging from weights to distances to financial figures, and more coming soon.”A.I. Will propose context for a variety of number types, including currency, measurements, and more. The feature will be able to adapt based on the measurement used and location.
“So I was showing an example with miles, but if I was doing that somewhere else in the world outside of the United States, I would be getting more relevant suggestions to my locale,” Johnson added.The A.I.-based PowerPoint Designer tool will be available for Office for the web. Microsoft noted perpetual licenses of Office won’t get the A.I. Intelligent coachingIn addition to using artificial intelligence to build powerful slides to tell more impactful stories, PowerPoint is also using machine learning to give you coaching to deliver a more effective presentation. The Presenter Coach in PowerPoint not only analyzes your speed — how fast you’re talking — but it can be used to give you feedback.“Based on academic research and field studies, we’ve integrated presentation best practices into Presenter Coach to help people give more effective presentations,” Johnson said.For example, if you’re just reading the words on your slide verbatim, Presenter Coach will pop up and tell you to pay attention to originality.
If you stutter and start using filler words — it will tell you to cut those words out.The tool also recognizes context as well. If you say that “you’re the best man for the job,” Presenter Coach will appear and let you know that the phrasing may be culturally insensitive. At the end of the presentation, you’ll get a more detailed coaching report, which proposes detailed suggestions, like “best man for the job” could instead be phrased as “best person for the job.”“So now when I’m finished with my presentation, I’ll exit out and coach will pop up and give me this detailed report that also includes pacing information to let me know how fast or slow I was talking during the presentation,” Johnson said. “This report gives me a recap of the tips that I received during the session and lets me know where to focus.”At launch, Presenter Coach will be available on PowerPoint for the web later this year, but it will eventually head to desktop and mobile clients for Office 365 subscribers.
Today’s post was written by Kirk Koenigsbauer, corporate vice president for the Office team.
Office 2016 hit the market just two months ago and over the coming weeks we’re rolling out the next wave of monthly innovations for Office 365 subscribers. This month, PowerPoint leads the way with game changing tools that make it simple to build designer grade layouts and transitions. With this month’s feature update, we’re also introducing Office Insider, an ongoing preview program available to Office 365 subscribers.
Taking presentations to the next level
PowerPoint Designer and Morph are new intelligent tools that work for you by automating the creation of slides and presentations, helping everyone get more out of Office. With a cloud-powered recommendation engine and smart animation technology, these new PowerPoint capabilities help anyone create polished slides and captivating motion effects with just a few quick steps.
Introducing PowerPoint Designer
PowerPoint Designer allows anyone to create high quality professional slides within seconds. Just drop an image into your presentation and Designer provides you with several design ideas. Select your favorite and you’re done! This allows you to spend less time figuring out how to produce high quality designs and more time preparing for that key moment—your presentation.
This all works thanks to a powerful combination of automated design and smart image analysis. PowerPoint Designer was built in collaboration with professional graphic designers, who helped develop over 12,000 creative blueprints. Designer applies cloud intelligence to analyze and identify the most compelling portion of your images to determine which blueprints work best with your content. For example, if the visual contains a natural scene, Designer can zoom, crop and frame it. But if the image contains a chart, it focuses in on the relevant region to ensure the important data is highlighted. Designer then selects from the 12,000+ blueprints to provide multiple layout options to help you make the most of your image. The end result is a high quality and customized presentation—in seconds.
This first release of Designer will do amazing things, but it’s going to get even better with time. In the coming months, we will expand Designer to work with additional slide types.
Create cinematic motion with Morph
Morph creates cinematic motion by seamlessly animating between your slides. Morph doesn’t just animate regular text or images, it can animate 3-D shapes or be applied at a word or even character level, including text wrapping. Simply duplicate slides you want morphed together, move the objects based on how you want them to animate and click the Morph button under Transitions. You’ll be amazed with the quality of animations you create with just one click.
Exclusively available to Office 365 subscribers, PowerPoint Designer and Morph are premium authoring and editing features. PowerPoint Designer and Morph are available first in PowerPoint 2016 for Windows desktop and Windows Mobile, but expect to see these same features rolling out to other platforms in the coming months.
Join the new Office Insider community
Today, we’re also launching Office Insider, a new program that allows Office 365 Home, Office 365 Personal and Office 365 University subscribers to opt in to pre-release builds of Office 2016 for Windows. As an Insider, you get first-hand access to the latest innovations, putting you on the inside track for all things Office. And when you become an Office Insider, you are joining a community of like-minded power users. With your partnership, we can ensure a high quality Office experience for millions of Office users worldwide.
Sign up and learn more by visiting the Office Insider page. If you are a commercial Office 365 subscriber and would like to get early access to new features, you can opt in to Office 365 First Release. Mac customers, stay tuned for more shortly on Office Insider for Mac.
Get started
These PowerPoint innovations are just the highlights of new Office 365 exclusive value we are delivering this month. You’ll see new capabilities and improved usability across Office 2016 for Windows, including personal finance templates in Excel, new sharing options across Word, PowerPoint and Excel, and online video embedding in OneNote. Learn more about the November update here.
This month’s updates will be available to Office Insider participants in the coming week. Then, over the following weeks, the update will roll out to consumer and commercial Office 365 subscribers.
To get started:
![Enable design ideas powerpoint mac Enable design ideas powerpoint mac](/uploads/1/2/6/6/126619550/465362534.jpg)
- Buy Office 365 to get the 2016 apps and these exciting new enhancements.
- Already an Office 365 Home, Personal or University subscriber? Opt in to Office Insider and get access to Designer, Morph and updates across Office 2016 when they become available. Visit office.com/insider to learn more.
Thanks for your continued feedback and support.
—Kirk Koenigsbauer
![](/uploads/1/2/6/6/126619550/460585569.jpg)