[Upbeat music]
How can you create more attractive slides in PowerPoint?
The answer is the PowerPoint Designer. Hi, I'm Dawn Bjork,
The Software Pro and a Microsoft Certified Trainer. In this training,
we'll focus on using Design Ideas in PowerPoint to quickly transform your text
and graphic slides to create more appealing and effective presentations.
The PowerPoint Designer is a feature that uses artificial intelligence to
improve slides by automatically generating a variety of Design Ideas that you
can choose from. And most important,
you don't need to have any design or art skills yourself.
And most of these Design Ideas are available with just a few clicks.
With the PowerPoint Design Ideas,
you can take a boring basic title slide like this and easily make it
more visually appealing and with a few clicks,
a basic bullet list can become more interesting and descriptive and you can
save hours of work trying to lay out images by using the suggested Design
Ideas.
There are three important tips to know about what the Design Ideas. First,
Designer is only available with Microsoft Office 365 and Design Ideas
will not be available with every template.
They're only supported by presentations that are based either on the PowerPoint
blank template and some of the standard PowerPoint templates.
But you can even work around that if Design Ideas isn't available for your
current template.
Simply create the layouts in a blank presentation and then copy those slides
into your presentations.
It's also good to know that even with a basic template,
not all slide layouts are supported.
Design Ideas work with blank slides and title slides,
but still there's so much power that you can get from Design Ideas.
Let's get started here.
I have a new blank presentation with a title slide layout.
I don't even have any content. If you'd like to work with Design Ideas,
you'll find this in a couple of places, the Home tab and the Design tab.
Design Ideas is found to the right-hand side of the Ribbon.
The first time you try out the PowerPoint Designer,
it may ask your permission to get Design Ideas for you,
and so this is something you may need to turn on to enable the
Connected Experiences or artificial intelligence.
But notice that once we have the Design Ideas,
even for a blank slide with no content yet,
PowerPoint is already showing us Design Ideas for this slide
layout. And, over time,
PowerPoint will learn from your experience and your preferences and try to
show you Design Ideas that are most appropriate or might be most interesting to
you. These even include some video and other graphic
options. I could pick this and then, just in a few minutes,
I already have start for a much more interesting or appealing
presentation than what I had with just a standard blank template.
And if you want something else,
simply pick another idea and at any time you can press CTRL+Z or
choose Undo to return back to the previous layout or design.
Here I have another blank presentation.
The only difference is that there is some text added to the title slide, and so,
as we saw before, choose Home and then on the far-right, Design Ideas.
This opens up the Design Pane for this text.
And from here,
we can see that we have some ideas where we could quickly
create a design for our title slide
without needing to have any design experience.
You can see a variety of different options,
but what happens if we add a graphic? Now for this,
I'll simply CTRL+Z or Undo and we'll
go to Insert > Pictures and
I'll look for an image here, bring this in.
Now we don't even have to lay it out, size it, or move around.
Look what we get from Design Ideas, all sorts of possibilities.
Preview these to see what works for you.
Notice that even a gradient here is added,
but that's not something we need to know how it was built,
but just that now it gives us a much more attractive, more professional option.
Explore how you can use Design Ideas even for presentations where it
might feel like, well, I really don't have a lot of images or charts.
It's just a lot of text. We can still make it much more attractive.
Let's look at some other examples. Here's another slide,
just a simple title slide on a topic that you might think doesn't really lends
itself to a lot of imagery or lots of graphics,
but even then we can leverage the Design Ideas to make this more
interesting.
This is actually using one of the PowerPoint templates in this case,
Retrospect, that will support Design Ideas. So once again,
either under the Home tab or the Design tab,
choose Design Ideas and look at the
possibilities of simply making this perhaps more
visually appealing. What about your basic bullet list? Well,
bullets don't have to be boring and they don't even have to be bullets.
That's the key thing here with Design Ideas.
Look at what's possible over on the right-hand side here we see in the
Design Ideas Pane that we could make this more
visual even with icons and notice how the artificial intelligence is
looking at the terminology,
the words here and showing potential icons that would
be related to that
or we could even make it more interesting.
So what a contrast to go from that basic bullet
list now to something that could be much more interesting.
Here are some of those options that fit that text.
Now, although we didn't do it in this case,
I like to make a copy of my starting slide first
simply so if I want to go back to that text or if there's something that I need
to change in terms of the content. Now these are editable,
but you may want to actually go back to that original slide.
So this is still text that we could click into and make changes to
as PowerPoint creates these Design Ideas for you.
You're not limited to what you see.
One of the nice things about that is that although I think it does a great job
most of the time in matching those key terms and concepts,
you can always change those illustrations. So these icons, these illustrations,
can be modified. Let's go ahead and see how that would be possible.
First, I'll simply select that icon. Now,
notice here that by simply picking Change icon,
we could pick something else. So if I wanted to use this one instead,
I could simply pick that or I could see all the
icons that are possible.
And look at the possibility for how this could be searched so you even have
more variety creativity for how you might work with these
images.
You can also find this feature under the Insert tab under icons,
so whether or not you're using Design Ideas,
know that that's another resource for you to be able to access these
images or these icons. What about images? You don't have to be an artist.
You don't need to know about how to lay it out.
How many times if you spent possibly hours trying to get
images to look nice together in a layout? Well, with Design Ideas,
you could do that in a couple of clicks, in a few minutes.
Look at this here,
we have so many different possibilities for how we could
make that slide much more attractive
and there are many other ideas as well.
Let's look at a couple other possibilities.
I shared the tip that when you have text or a slide with images,
it's a good idea to make a copy of that and one quick way to do that is with
CTRL+D, think Duplicate. That way,
we can always go back to that original slide.
Ultimately you might decide to delete it or you could move it to the end of your
presentation or even hide it. Once we have a copy,
now this helps me to feel a little bit more comfortable being creative and
exploring those possibilities. So from that copy, once again,
I want to make sure that Design Ideas are enabled and look at these
possibilities. It's not necessary to resize the images,
try to get them to be the same dimensions.
Design Ideas does that for you. Now,
as we've seen the PowerPoint Designer, it detects pictures, charts,
tables,
and it can give you several different suggestions for arranging them in an
attractive, useful layout.
One of the things we see too often in PowerPoint size is too much text on one
slide.
So that may be a content issue where the text should be split to
two or three more slides or that perhaps an image would be a better
option for us when we have a list or bullets,
something that we want to convert. The Design Ideas, once again,
will give us some great suggestions.
So notice there's something a little different here. These are dates.
By simply moving into that slide and then choosing the
Design Ideas, in this case I'll choose the Design tab and Design Ideas,
PowerPoint is smart enough to recognize the dates.
It also is once again looking for those key words.
So here's one possibility being able to pull in
that particular content. But what about those dates?
Well, that's something that could be displayed in a timeline.
Now this isn't as accurate as a typical timeline we might see with a project
management program. So if you want something that's more exact,
this wouldn't be the right choice for you.
But it is an interesting visual that shows those dates in a more
linear way. And once again, another possibility for that.
So for your next presentation,
explore how you can leverage PowerPoint's
Design Ideas to create much more interesting effective
communication. Now if for some reason you don't want the PowerPoint Designer,
and I'm not sure why that would be, but you can turn it off.
So if you don't want it offering you suggestions,
then we would do this under File > Options.
And under the General tab here is PowerPoint Designer
and you can decide whether or not you want it to automatically show you the
Design Ideas or it's something that you would enable as you wish.
Decide what works best for you. If it's not intrusive, you can keep it checked,
but know that you also have the option to turn that off.
But at anytime you can still go back and find it under the Home tab or under the
Design tab.
Now you've seen how to save time and effort by working with the PowerPoint
Designer to create attractive and more effective slides and graphics.
For more tips on being productive with PowerPoint,
head to TheSoftwarePro.com/PowerPoint. If
this training was helpful,
please like and comment on this video and subscribe to this channel.
This is Dawn Bjork, The Software Pro. Thanks for watching.