PowerPoint Designer is perhaps the most interesting and useful feature in PowerPoint 365. It turns a basic slide into something eye-catching. Here’s how to use Design Ideas effectively and wisely.
It’s a very quick and easy way to take a couple of Design Elements and create a full-blooded Custom Style for your Slide Show with a couple of clicks.
On the left there are two images added (dumped) into a slide. At right is what’s possible with a few clicks of PowerPoint Designer.
Designer works in 2 ways:
- Fixing a slide. Taking some images or text dumped into a slide and making them look nice.
- Design Template. Create an overall look for the presentation.
PowerPoint Designer is available in all Office 365 programs and apps; PowerPoint for Windows, Mac, iPad, Android tablets, Mobile and PowerPoint Online (on the web).
It’s a cloud service with your slide content sent to Microsoft. Keep that in mind for any confidential or private presentations.
Fixing a Slide
Designer can make suggestions for arranging the images and text in an existing slide.
On a blank Slide (or any of the default slides available), insert a couple of Photographs plus some text or text boxes.
Don’t worry about Positioning or Cropping them, Designer just needs to have them in play…
Designer might appear automatically, it’s a persistent little beggar that runs the risk of becoming the 21st Century version of Clippy!
If the Designer Pane doesn’t appear go to Design | Designer | Design Ideas
Clicking this opens the Design Ideas Pane. PowerPoint uses its cloud service to suggest designs for the slide elements.
Here you can see that PowerPoint has generated a number of Design Ideas based solely on the two Images and the text boxes in the empty Slide.
Click on designs in the pane to see how it looks in the full slide. We ended up choosing this one.
Not bad, eh? A couple of clicks and you’ve got a very stylish looking Presentation.
Don’t like Microsoft’s suggestions? Click at the bottom of the designer pane to scroll down for more.
Design Template
Alternatively, use Designer to suggest an overall look for your presentation before you begin.
Create a new Blank Slide. As before, Design | Design Ideas and you’ll access the Design Ideas Pane. They should be different this time as it will have a selection of Automatically Generated Ideas for you to choose from
Stand Out from the Crowd
As you can see there are some rather attractive choices here but just bear in mind, this feature ships with PowerPoint by default so there are plenty of other users out there who might choose the same design as you.
Nothing worse than turning up to give a Presentation and discovering that the person before you used the same Theme Style as you!
Most people choose from the first three or four designs offered. A simple way to avoid looking the same as other people is to scroll down the Designer list a few times and select something further down.