In the coming weeks, Office 365 subscribers will get two new tools for PowerPoint that use the cloud to really make presentations look better, and feel more alive.
Microsoft is tackling the temptation to create boring slides by adding a new PowerPoint Designer feature. Designer allows to create pretty slides really quickly. Graphic designers have helped Microsoft develop 12,000 blueprints so that when the user first insert an image into a slide deck it will offer up some unique ways to style slides.Designer uses Microsoft’s cloud and machine learning to process image and pick the right layout for image. The user have to agree to upload images for processing and can use this option on different images and presentation will always look different. Microsoft is also planning to add automatic color options in the future, to pick out the prominent colors from an image and adjust the slide style accordingly. Some of the many blueprints save a lot of time, ie we don’t have to crop images manually and apply effects, coloring, or change opacity.
Microsoft’s second tool, Morph, creates slide animations effortlessly. Morph can animate text, images, and even 3D shapes. If you want some slides to animate then you just duplicate them and move the objects based on how you want them to animate. Morph is a new transition effect that will automatically figure out the animations you want and apply them. Some of the results are impressive for basic animations, and you could see how tutorials could benefit greatly from Morph.
Microsoft is planning to offer Designer and Morph exclusively to Office 365 subscribers using the full desktop version of PowerPoint or the new Windows 10 variant. In the coming months these features will be available to other platforms like iOS and Android. Microsoft is also launching an Office Insider program that will provide members early access to pre-release versions of Office 2016 for Windows.