Microsoft's new PowerPoint tools make your presentations way less boring
It's not a secret that PowerPoint presentations can be really, really
dull. The last thing you want on a Friday afternoon is a bland slide
deck and transitions from the 1990s, so Microsoft is trying to make
things a lot less boring. In the coming weeks, Office 365 subscribers
will get two new tools for PowerPoint that use the cloud to really make
presentations look better, or feel more alive with some cool motion
effects.
Microsoft is tackling the temptation to create boring slides by
adding a new PowerPoint Designer feature. Like the name implies,
Designer lets you create pretty slides really quickly. Microsoft has had
a variety of themes in PowerPoint over the years, but Designer is
different. Graphic designers have helped Microsoft develop 12,000
blueprints so that when you first insert an image into a slide deck it
will offer up some unique ways to style your slides.
Designer uses Microsoft's cloud and machine learning to process your
image and pick the right layout for your image. You'll have to agree to
upload your images for processing, but it means you could use this
option on different images and your 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, meaning you 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. Microsoft is taking a special approach with
Office that means these feature will appear cross-platform, too. That
means in the coming months these features will be available to other
platforms like iOS and Android. These features are cloud-powered, which
is an interesting hint at the future of how Office will evolve. Machine
learning is an ongoing battle for companies like Microsoft and Google,
and we're starting to see the results of how software is really
leveraging powerful servers to create individual features.
Alongside these new tools, Microsoft is also launching an Office
Insider program. Like the Windows Insiders effort, Office Insider will
provide members early access to pre-release versions of Office 2016 for
Windows. Microsoft is also planning to offer the same to Mac users with
an Office Insider for Mac program launching soon. If you're interested
in using the new Morph and Designer features of PowerPoint early then
you can opt-in to the Office 365 First Release, and Microsoft also has a sign-up page for the new Office Insider program, too.
Courtesy: TheVerge
