Microsoft declares war on boring PowerPoint presentations
Except that they kind of suck - Jeff Bezos actually placed a blanket ban on PowerPoint at Amazon.com early on.
It's not really Microsoft's fault. PowerPoint gives you all kinds of templates and graphics tools, but all anyone ever uses is boring bullet points on a white background.
Today, Microsoft is introducing a pair of new PowerPoint features, Designer and Morph, that make it a lot harder to create a boring presentation."We want to make PowerPoint smarter," PowerPoint Partner Group Program Manager Shawn Villaron tells Business Insider. "The quality of your slides is going to go up."
The catch is that you'll need a Microsoft Office 365 subscription to take advantage, and the new features are only on the Windows desktop and Windows Mobile versions of PowerPoint thus far. Microsoft promises it's coming to other versions of PowerPoint in the future.
But Villaron says the mere fact that these major new features are being released less than two months after Microsoft Office 2016 came out is proof that the monthly fee is worth it, as the company picks up the pace with all its software.
PowerPoint Designer
The first feature, called PowerPoint Designer, actually suggests slide layouts and features based on the content. If you include a picture, for example, it suggests a series of remixed slide designs that might change the color scheme to match the photo, or place the photo at an interesting, eye-catching angle, or both.
So you drag a picture into your slide, like so. Note the Designer suggestions on the right:
If you choose one, it looks like this:
Nothing that Designer suggests is anything that you couldn't do yourself. But even if you knew the right menu options to get to the features, you don't necessarily have the design background (or the patience) to make it all sing.
And so, rather than take control away from the user, Villaron says, the whole point of Designer is to shorten the loop between Microsoft's internal team of graphics experts and users.
Furthermore, Microsoft is actually leaning on its machine learning expertise on the backend to constantly update Designer with new, more relevant and good-looking suggestions. This is a big part of why you need that Office 365 subscription to take advantage: Villaron says it's going to get better and smarter over time.
PowerPoint Morph
The second big update is PowerPoint Morph, which makes it much easier to do simple animations in your presentation.
Sure, you can do animations in PowerPoint today. But, again, even if you know how, they're weird and fidgety and take lot of steps to accomplish.
Meanwhile, check out this presentation by Microsoft PowerPoint Senior Manager Chris Maloney, made with PowerPoint Morph: