Using Artificial Intelligence to Improve Your Visuals

In this chapter, we’ll be creating visually appealing content with a very interesting feature available in the modern version of PowerPoint (Microsoft 365): artificial intelligence (AI). Microsoft’s development teams have made it possible for their suite of applications to comprehend what users are trying to do and suggest solutions to help speed up the process of certain tasks.

Even though there are many features leveraging AI, this chapter will focus on PowerPoint Designer. Basically, Designer is a feature that will analyze what you are doing and automatically suggest professional-looking design ideas.

By now, it must be clear that my goal is to empower business users that need to create visually appealing and impactful presentations in less time. Introducing you to Designer will help you reduce the time to create various presentation elements. In this chapter, we will discuss the following topics:

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Technical requirements

This chapter requires having a Microsoft 365 subscription and optional connected experiences turned on. Since the subscription model means the application is updated on an ongoing basis and the frequency of updates might be controlled by your IT department or whether you opted in to Microsoft’s Insider Program, please read the requirements section of the Microsoft Support article mentioned in the Further reading section.

Creating great image layouts with Designer

For as long as I can remember, I have heard users complaining about not knowing where to start when they were tasked to create presentations. Even if I have explained a simple process to plan your content, it does not mean you will find it easy to create your visuals. That is when using the latest version of PowerPoint with the Designer feature will be an advantage.

Setting up Designer

Before we dive into the great design ideas we might get when adding images to slides, let’s make sure Designer is active in your application. Being part of Microsoft’s connected services that leverage AI while being connected to the internet, you might want to check some of PowerPoint’s options. You need to access the File | Options | General options and have a look at the Privacy Settings (1) and PowerPoint Designer (2) sections (see Figure 5.1).

In the PowerPoint Designer section, there are two checkboxes (as of Version 2209,...

Using Designer to create visual lists and timelines

Many times, I have heard clients tell me they just did not have time to search visuals, so they simply added text or keywords to their slides. But now, every Microsoft 365 user can get help from Designer being able to search your words to match them with relevant images. There is no more excuse to have only text on your slides! Let’s see a few examples of how well Designer can translate your words into visual elements.

Design ideas from a list

Creating a list of bullet points is something we have been doing for a very long time in PowerPoint. For this example and the following ones, I will also show you how Designer keeps the design ideas on brand by using slides that have a simple colored rectangle at the bottom in its template.

In Figure 5.8, we have a Title and Content layout with a list of three short sentences (1): Update your software, Update your system, and Restart your computer. Depending on your settings...

Using Designer ideas to start a presentation theme from scratch

You have been asked to present on a special topic and have no template for it. And of course, people come to you when deadlines are short. No worries, you can speed up the creation process by starting with a blank presentation and letting Designer provide you with a template. I can already see people rolling their eyes at this one, especially in big corporations where they have teams to create corporate templates, or budgets to hire a design agency to do it. But for small organizations with no team and no budget, Designer theme ideas can be a lifesaver.

These are the steps for using Designer ideas for your presentation theme:

1. The way it works is quite simple. Start with a blank presentation and inspire yourself with the design ideas in the Designer pane (1) (Figure 5.13). You will get designed title slides that provide quality images, short videos, or animated content displayed on various layouts and using a...

Bringing perspective to your data with Designer

The human brain has a hard time figuring out what large numbers really mean. For example, the size of my country, Canada, is 9,985 million km2 or 3,855 million square miles. That sure sounds big, but we could make it more relevant by comparing it to something else that might help make it more relatable. If I am presenting to a European audience, I could compare it to the size of France and add that Canada is 149 times the size of France. Finding relatable comparisons for large numbers can be time-consuming but we can again turn to Designer to help us, thanks to Microsoft Research’s Perspectives Engine.

To see how it works, let’s start with a simple example where I have added a title placeholder, Commercial planes fly at 30,000 feet (Figure 5.17). The Designer feature supplied a list of design ideas, and I applied the first one (1). First of all, it was great to have a nice-quality image supplied just because the word...

Summary

In this chapter, we discussed PowerPoint’s Designer features, which can help you create more visually impactful slides quickly. You can now leverage the feature to create great layouts for slides that include many images, change bulleted lists to something more visually appealing, start a new presentation and leverage Designer theme ideas, and bring perspective to your large numbers.

Unless you don’t already have a Microsoft 365 subscription, there is no reason to create boring slides with text only, or blank PowerPoint presentations with no design, because you feel like you are not creative, or are design-challenged. But I do need to warn you of one thing: if you skip all the planning steps and just add content that lacks structure, using any of Designer’s design ideas will just make your slides look good, and not necessarily help have a clear message or make your presentation more impactful.

In the next chapter, we will be discussing how you can...

Further reading

• Microsoft Designer support article (see the Requirements section): https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/office/create-professional-slide-layouts-with-designer-53c77d7b-dc40-45c2-b684-81415eac0617
• Microsoft article for Perspectives Engine: https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/project/perspectives-engine/