One of the incremental improvements within PowerPoint Designer, as the Office applications begin to add more intelligent capabilities enabled through the cloud, is its ability to turn text into readable SmartArt graphics, including timelines. Or maybe you went out and purchased one of the literally hundreds of project planning and timeline templates that can be found online. Of course, we’ve probably all spent hours of our time, painstakingly creating intricate timelines to help communicate the status of a project. If you’ve not yet had a chance to experiment with PowerPoint Designer, it’s well worth your time to check out what it can do.

The end result is a high quality and customized presentation-in seconds. Designer then selects from the 12,000+ blueprints to provide multiple layout options to help you make the most of your image. But if the image contains a chart, it focuses in on the relevant region to ensure the important data is highlighted. For example, if the visual contains a natural scene, Designer can zoom, crop and frame it. Designer applies cloud intelligence to analyze and identify the most compelling portion of your images to determine which blueprints work best with your content. PowerPoint Designer was built in collaboration with professional graphic designers, who helped develop over 12,000 creative blueprints. This all works thanks to a powerful combination of automated design and smart image analysis. When it was introduced in the Office blog by Kirk Koenigsbauer, cvp for the Office team, back in November 2015, where he described it as: The real power of PowerPoint Designer, however, is the automation of slide creation using a cloud-powered recommendation engine.

But Microsoft continues to add capabilities to the entire Office suite, and timelines is one of the latest features to help your team members become more productive. Microsoft made a big push around PowerPoint Designer back in the fall of 2015 when they also announced the Morph capability (which is an awesome tool that I don’t use enough). For people like me who do not have the patience to create the beautiful and amazing PowerPoint slides we see from our peers, there is PowerPoint Designer to the rescue. In fact, a running joke whenever I present at SPTechCon events during their Lightning Talks is that I use an Arial font with a plain white background and no design at all, which is always in stark contrast to all of the other presentations. How often do you use PowerPoint Designer when creating presentations? Personally, I’ve never been very good at making PowerPoint look good.

Timeline smartart powerpoint