PowerPoint 2016 for Windows (Office 365 subscribers) is getting a new feature to help you make the basics of a presentation.

QuickStarter is now available for PowerPoint for Windows Insider (Fast) build 16.0.7823.1000  and later.  It will released to Slow ring Insiders then the public in the coming months.

QuickStarter will grab information from public web sites and searches then arrange them into a series of slides.

Microsoft’s excuses aside, this is a gift for any school student rushing to finish an assignment.  I’m sure teachers will become familiar with the look and structure of a QuickStarted presentation (just as they already know when slabs of Wikipedia are pasted into essays).

It’s certainly a fast way to make the ‘bare bones’ of a presentation on a general knowledge topic.

When it’s available to you, QuickStarter will appear on the New pane as ‘Start an outline’.

An opening screen appears to explain what QuickStarter will do.  It appears only the first time you use QuickStarter.

Intelligent Services and your privacy

If it’s your first time with Microsoft’s ‘Intelligent Services’ you’ll get a notice that very much ‘accentuates the positive‘ about cloud services and almost ‘eliminate the negatives‘.

Clicking ‘Turn On’ applies not just to PowerPoint but also Word, Outlook and any other future uses of these cloud services.

Microsoft can do a lot more with your personal or business info than merely ‘support and improve the Intelligent Services for you’.  Their terms of service and privacy statement gives Microsoft very wide discretion to use your documents in any way they see fit.  In the past, Redmond has used customers cloud storage data for their own self-interest.

Search Results

Now we get to QuickStarter itself.  Type in a search topic.  QuickStarter works for the sort of public search you’d do on Google, Bing or Wikipedia.

Having just watched ‘The Adventures of Robin Hood’ for the nth time, we chose the star for our example.

Click on the image/label that best matches what you need.  Select sub-topics and an initial design.

The first two slides are hidden and won’t appear in the presentation.  They are an introduction to the topic with additional info in the Notes section.

The rest of the slides are placeholders for you to fill in with details from further research or slide notes inserted by QuickStarter.