LONDON: If there’s one problem with presentation software, it’s that it’s hard for many people to create slides that look and feel professional. While Microsoft does its best to provide people with templates, it can still be hard to make slides look good — and that’s made doubly difficult for users starting from a blank canvas.
Microsoft is aiming to solve that with a new feature for PowerPoint 2016 called Designer that helps people who aren’t presentation experts put together good-looking slides. When users go to insert an image into their presentation, Designer automatically pops up a sidebar on the right-hand side of the PowerPoint window with a handful of design ideas.
There are more than 12,000 layouts, which Microsoft created in conjunction with professional designers. In order to present only a handful of layouts to users, Designer looks at the images inserted and detects the most important content to influence its decision.