Microsoft PowerPoint has become almost synonymous with corporate presentations and slide shows. The software suite already became more powerful with inclusion of small but powerful AI features from Microsoft. Now, a new upgrade to it seeks to improve not only presentations but presentation skills too.
Designer, a cloud-based recommendation tool which chooses the slide layouts, themes, color and styles for your slides, receives many new features to help users create visually engaging slides on the go. Microsoft also announced that Designer has crossed a major milestone of 1 billion slides since its introduction in 2016.
PowerPoint Designer’s new features include addition of branded templates, Designer perspective and Design ideas. The new upgrade also features a long awaited feature – Presentation Coach.
Branded templates targets large companies and organization. Employees can now choose from a range templates without compromising on the brand guidelines of that particular organization. This feature gives organizations the power to define their own brand guidelines so that Designer can provide ideas based on these guidelines.
Designer now automatically selects layouts, themes and styles for your slides. When your write something on a blank slide, it suggests high-quality pictures for that slide which reflects the text. These pictures are fully-licensed for commercial use. Designer also recommends complementary color palettes for the select themes.
Designer now integrates with Microsoft Research’s Perspective Engine to recognize large numbers and augments relevant text to them to ease the interpretation of data. This feature makes numerical figures digestible by providing a similar, comprehensible text.
The highlight of this upgrade is the Presentation Coach which helps you improve your presentation skills. While PowerPoint can help one make excellent presentation, conveying those points to the audience depends on the speaker’s presentation skills. Now, with Presentation Coach you can practice your presentation and get real-time feedback.
Presentation coach lets you rehearse your presentation while it analyses your use of words and suggest filler words. It also prevents you from committing serious flaws like just reading out the slides. At the end of a session, it provides a summary which includes your pace, filler words, a thorough linguistic analysis and other parameters. It helps you focus on the areas to improve your presentation skills.
The new upgrade for Microsoft PowerPoint will be available for Office 365 subscribers on Windows 10 and Mac.
