Microsoft launches Office Insider program, PowerPoint Designer

PanARMENIAN.Net - Microsoft launched Friday, November 13, Office Insider, an ongoing preview program for Office 365 subscribers looking to test new features and improvements coming to the suite’s apps. Office Insider currently only applies to Office 2016 for Windows, which arrived just two months ago, though Microsoft said that a Mac version “is coming soon,” VentureBeat reports.

This is essentially the Microsoft Office counterpart to the Windows Insider program, which allows anyone to try preview builds of Windows 10. Testers can report bugs, try new features, and offer feedback to Microsoft on soon-to-be released features and improvements. The main difference is that the Windows Insider debuted before Windows 10 even went into preview, while Office Insider is launching long after Office 2016 has already shipped.

Nevertheless, the move ties into Microsoft’s plans to update its Office apps on a monthly basis. “Every month the Office engineering team ships updates across the Office apps, to include new functionality,” a Microsoft spokesperson told VentureBeat. This month, the big highlights are two new PowerPoint features: Designer and Morph.

The first is a cloud-powered recommendation engine and the second is smart animation technology. Both are tools that help automate the creation of slides and presentations, cutting down the time it takes to build a polished PowerPoint deck.

PowerPoint Designer is all about helping you build “differentiated” presentations. The workflow is as follows: Drop an image into your presentation, and if Designer detects that it can help, it will provide you with several design ideas in the right-hand pane which you can apply to the current slide. All you have to do is pick one.