PowerPoint Designer is an AI-powered feature in PowerPoint that helps you easily create professional slide designs. It uses artificial intelligence to suggest creative layouts, color schemes, fonts, and images to elevate your presentations.
In this step-by-step guide, you’ll learn:
- What PowerPoint Designer is and how it works
- How to enable PowerPoint Designer
- How to use the Design Ideas and Layout Suggestions features
- Tips for customizing the AI-generated designs
- How to incorporate your brand styles into the designs
Follow along to see how easy it is to create stunning slides with intelligent design ideas powered by AI.
Step 1: Enable PowerPoint Designer
PowerPoint Designer comes built into Office 365, so you likely already have access to it. To enable it:
- Open a PowerPoint presentation
- Go to the Design tab
- Check the box for Designer
This will toggle PowerPoint Designer on so you can start using its features.
Step 2: Generate Design Ideas
Design Ideas is the main feature in PowerPoint Designer that suggests complete slide designs. To use it:
- With a slide selected, go to the Design Ideas dropdown in the Design tab
- Click on Design Ideas
PowerPoint will think for a few seconds and then show you a carousel of creative slides based on the content you have on that slide.
Design ideas example
Scroll through the carousel to preview the different designs. When you see one you like, click on it to apply it to your slide.
The AI tries to choose appropriate layouts, fonts, color schemes, and imagery that matches your content. Feel free to generate more ideas if none of the initial suggestions are what you’re looking for.
Step 3: Use Layout Suggestions
In addition to completely new slide designs, PowerPoint Designer can intelligently tweak your existing layouts with its Layout Suggestions feature. To use it:
- Select a slide with a layout you want to improve
- Go to Layout Options in the Design tab
- Click on Layout Suggestions
This shows you variations of your current slide layout with changes to elements like text positioning, image sizing, and more.
For example, if your title and text placeholder boxes have the default positions, PowerPoint may suggest having the titles on the left and content text on the right. Review the options and pick the layout you like best.
Step 4: Customize the Designs
The AI-generated designs are a great starting point but you’ll likely want to customize them further for your specific needs.
When you apply a Design Idea, the slide will be in Design Ideas mode. Customize the design by:
- Editing placeholder text with your own content
- Changing fonts and colors in the Design tab
- Replacing suggested images with your own pictures
When you’re happy with the design, exit Design Ideas mode to finalize the slide and add animations or other finishing touches.
Step 5: Incorporate Brand Styles
To make your presentation slides cohesive, it’s important they align with your company or brand style guide.
The easiest way to do this is to first create a branded slide master with styles, fonts, colors, and graphics that match your branding. Then when generating design ideas, PowerPoint will pull elements from that master template.
You can also manually customize any of the suggested designs to fit your branding after applying them:
- Change colors to match brand colors
- Replace fonts with brand fonts
- Add brand logos and graphics
This extra step ensures your AI-powered designs still have a consistent, branded look.
Power Up Your Slides with PowerPoint Designer
As you can see, PowerPoint Designer makes it simple for anyone to create professional-quality slides that grab your audience’s attention.
It does the heavy-lifting of designing aesthetically pleasing layouts and matching visuals so you can focus on writing compelling content.
