Microsoft announced on Friday that it is giving PowerPoint some new “game changing” tools that make it easier to build “designer grade” layouts and transitions.
The PowerPoint update is just the first in a series of planned upgrades for Office 365 subscribers. The new tools include PowerPoint Designer and Morph, which automate the creation of slides and presentations and utilize a cloud-based recommendation engine and smart animation technology.
“PowerPoint Designer allows anyone to create high quality professional slides within seconds,” explains Kirk Koenigsbauer, corporate vice president for Microsoft’s Office team. “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,” he adds. “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.”
The Morph feature creates “cinematic motion” by animating between slides. It can even animate 3-D shapes or be applied at the word and character levels. That includes text-wrapping.
For more on how to use Morph, read this.
PowerPoint Designer and Morph are both premium features and are only available to Office 365 subscribers.
Image via Microsoft