PowerPoint Updates to Enhance Your Slide Design
When it comes to your slide design in PowerPoint, generic is the last thing that you want to be. We’ve seen it before: a presentation includes thoughtful, well-formed information, but lacks the slide design ideas to back it up.
Have you ever been in a presentation where someone is conveying wonderful information, yet the screen behind them takes away some of the credibility of the speaker? Think an overcrowded slide with various logos of sponsors on a bright magenta background or a presentation with a plain white background, black text and an unaligned photo.
Leaving the viewers with a bland, visually uninteresting presentation to follow, which, no matter how important and interesting the information is, you probably will have lost them from the first slide click and the rest of your presentation slides can lead to a total lack of audience engagement.
Thankfully, it doesn’t have to be this way. New design updates from Microsoft Office PowerPoint are making it easier than ever to make sure your presentation will click off the screen.
Unapologetically geeky as we are, we were overjoyed when these updates hit PowerPoint to help make it easier to design slides and we could not wait to tell the world about them.
We want to see how the everyday person uses this intelligent functionality to share their big ideas, concepts and goals to audiences, because we can learn from that too!
Before we go on and to teach you all about the latest Microsoft PowerPoint Slide Design updates which you will want to start using ASAP, we need to check that you are using the right version of PowerPoint and if you have can see click the design ideas button before we continue to the click through the fun stuff. Just a minor technical starting point and you’ll be good to go!
1. Does my version of PowerPoint have PowerPoint Designer?
If you are having issues finding the new PowerPoint Designer, or you click through and can’t get it working you might want to see what version of PowerPoint you are running. Usually as you launch, the startup will tell you what year or version you have.
You can also check by launching PowerPoint, go to File > About PowerPoint. You will want to use you Microsoft Office 365 subscription, or the latest version of PowerPoint. If you don’t have that version and want to get the designer feature, you should get it and give it a try!
With one click the design ideas, PowerPoint Designer comes up with several and really awesome slides based on what is on the current slide. You can also drag a photo into the slide to activate design ideas.
2. Why is PowerPoint not giving me design ideas?
If you can’t see or select the PowerPoint designer, you will need to turn the “design ideas button” on. To do this you will want to select the dialog box in options. To do this click File > Options, and in General, click Automatically show me design ideas in the PowerPoint designer section and check the box.
You will see there are two checkboxes in this section. You will probably want to click both options. The first checkbox is “Automatically show me design ideas”. Where you can ask to see design ideas at any time, click “design ideas” in the Design tab” and you will see in the second checkbox is ” Automatically show me design ideas when I create a new presentation”. PowerPoint will show design ideas for your presentation slides in the design pane when you create a new blank document.
Don’t forget, you also want to use an internet connection to get access to this feature. Office will use the internet to pull the slide design ideas as well as any icons which you may want to use on your slide as they are now housed online.
That was easy hey? (If not, there’s plenty of Youtube and How-Tos if you search “How to turn the Powerpoint Design Idea Button on”. Sometimes seeing it visually will help!) Now on to the click on to the fun stuff!
PowerPoint Designer To Boost Your Presentation Slides
The new PowerPoint Designer is a functionality now built into the PowerPoint software. It uses Artificial Intelligence to help users create more attractive and get effective presentations. Basically, PowerPoint Designer is a robot that gives you design ideas and suggestions (more than one) to complement your slide/slides in your presentation as you create it. Who wouldn’t get on board with that?
Recently, Microsoft upgraded the PowerPoint Designer’s Artificial Intelligence capabilities, giving users more control as far as layout and design. These new features are making it more efficient than ever to couple your content with visually striking PowerPoint slide design ideas. And the AI capabilities are being developed daily, so they’re only getting better at sensing your content.
If you couldn’t tell already, we geeks are over the moon about these new Office PowerPoint Designer features, and we think you will like it too. So, here are three of the most recent updates to PowerPoint Designer that you can start using with just one click.
Adding these new tools in your back pocket, you’ll find the calibre of your slides in your PowerPoint presentations rising exponentially. And you don’t need to study design to see how great they look! And if anyone asks you the question “Did you make that?”, you can technically answer yes!
Though the AI creates it, you are still the author in terms of content and shifting and customizing the templates itself. Your designs that result from using Designer is something to be proud of and shareable to your audience, colleagues and more!
Updated PowerPoint Designer Features
1. Designer for branded slide templates
One of our favourite new features is the branded slide templates, they are new slide designs, including layout, colours, fonts, logos, and visual aids, that stay consistent across all of a brand’s content. You will see from these slide templates, that they help strengthen brands by creating content cohesion and boosting brand recognition.
If you would like to get noticed and your brand is in desperate need of a strong image, make sure you follow a brand template. It is a wonderful solution to implement into your slides. If you and your brand value consistency and creating a strong brand presence, you cannot go without these branded slide templates.
Many companies used to struggle to created slides with the fact that PowerPoint Designer didn’t coordinate with branded slide templates, making it frustrating to use. This meant that brands couldn’t click through Designer’s suggestions for their presentation slides, instead, they had to use manually create slide designs ideas one by one, taking up a lot of the valuable time in the office, creating each slide on their own according to their brand template.
It also opened up the risk for the creation of design ideas that clashed with brands’ identities, weakening overall company cohesion. Especially since Designer can significantly cut down on the time one needs to create slides for their Office PowerPoint presentation, this issue was one major point of frustration for many companies and brand enthusiasts of the company.
To address this concern, Microsoft Office released Designer for branded slide templates. This feature coordinates design ideas with their established branding and visual identity protocols, which allows the user to easily choose and apply the slide design they want to use by typing some text. So, whether you’re making a sales pitch or educating employees, your brand image will shine through your PowerPoint slide design like a champ. The colour, style and tone of your brand will land!
2. PowerPoint Designer automatic slide theme ideas
A clear, cohesive design theme is a key aspect of all PowerPoint slide designs. Each slide needs to subsequently provide a smooth click transition from the previous slide while leading effortlessly into the next slide.
This ensures that your audience’s focus is sparked throughout the presentation, beginning to end.
Having visual unity through out the slides is just as important as the content, animation and flow of the presentation.
With theme ideas on Designer, you can jumpstart the design of your presentation with the ease of a lifetime PowerPoint geek and all it takes is some text. Just click open up a new blank slide presentation click on the blank slide and type some text.
The text you what typed into the PowerPoint slide will allow you to see PowerPoint Designer, like a Jedi using the Force, get design ideas from the content of your text automatically. There’s no need to even click a button.
You’ll be presented with a range of slides with theme styles, photographs, and colour schemes that reflect the text based on PowerPoint Designer’s findings. PowerPoint Designer can even provide relevant artwork based on your text to use in the content on your slides.
The photos and artwork suggested on the slides theme ideas by PowerPoint Designer are officially licensed for commercial use – no copyright concerns here click away.
Plus, when you select an image on the slide design, Designer will offer up a corresponding colour scheme to incorporate into the slides of your presentation. This takes the guesswork out of figuring out the best one theme to use in your PowerPoint slide design, by providing all the necessary tools to an attractive, unified presentation.
3. Designer Perspectives
Microsoft Office Research found that large statistics and numerical values can be better understood and retained when they’re related to accessible references. To address the common problem of poor slide design leading to poor audience engagement with large numerical values in presentations, they created a brand-new tool.
The Perspective Engine from Microsoft Office Research is a recent development that we geeks can’t get enough of, we like it that much! With this tool, PowerPoint Designer is now able to identify slides with large numbers that may be tricky for an audience to absorb quickly. Then, Perspectives provides context for the numerical values by automatically adding a comparative perspective. What an awesome design idea!
This tool can help you seamlessly provide points of reference for your audience, allowing them to better understand and see what your company has to offer. This will also facilitate the retention of information so that your audience can recall your presentation slides long after it’s ended. Just think of it a way of pacing.
If you recall your favourite song, you remember certain lyrics because there’s emphasis, a pause or an exciting beat behind the chorus. The Perspective Engine is kind of like that – it allows your audience to prioritize information and keep what sticks out to them.
PowerPoint Designer Aligns With Innovation
Given that Artificial Intelligence is one of the most quickly advancing trends in technology today, it’s no wonder that Office PowerPoint is now using incorporating it into their software. With the amount of time that Artificial Intelligence can cut from the process of creating a stellar PowerPoint slide design, we’re glad that they did!
The Office PowerPoint Designer updates listed above can provide you with insights to create a consistent, well-organized, and appealing presentation for any purpose with a click.
This functionality allows anyone to make a dynamic PowerPoint, regardless of their skillset. And the PowerPoint can be used commercially as with your subscription or purchase of the software, you gain access to using all these templates and designs without having to copyright or pay for use.
This is a new age of Office PowerPoint software, and we’re on the edge of our seat to see what the future has in store for presentation design.
We want to see how the everyday person can elevate their content, their big ideas and concepts using PowerPoint Designer. We like how PowerPoint has made this great equalizer and simple tool for everyone to use.
