Microsoft wants to use the cloud to make PowerPoint less boring

For most people, PowerPoint is boring. When you need to make a presentation, it’s the most basic and obvious choice. Unless you have some design chops and/or a lot of time, a ‘beautiful PowerPoint presentation’ is often something of an oxymoron. But that could start changing. Microsoft is introducing two tools today called Designer and Morph that strive to make your PowerPoint slides look like they were created by a pro designer, as well as enable smooth graphic transitions that simply weren’t possible before. First up, Designer uses cloud-based machine learning to help you create professional-looking slides in seconds. It works like this: drop an image or two into your slide, PowerPoint sends the graphics to the cloud, and then provides you with several different templates it thinks best suits the image. These are based off of over 12,000 blueprints created by actual designers. Microsoft demo’d the tool, and even within pre-set scenarios, I was impressed at how well the app was able to distinguish between different types of images. For example, if you have a generic-looking stock photo, it knows that you might want to use that photo as a background, and that it’s okay to crop out some parts or apply an overlay.