Randy Dean shows how to modernize old PowerPoint slides using Design Ideas, including a workaround when the feature returns no suggestions: create a blank slide, type a keyword like "email" or "calendar", let Design Ideas generate graphics, then copy them back to your original slide.
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All right, hi everybody, Randy Dean, the Email Sanity Expert here. Want to do another microlearning video. And this one, I actually was working on something yesterday and said, ooh, this would be a good microlearning video because I was working on updating one of my PowerPoints. I had noticed that it looked a bit dated, needed a little bit new graphics. And so I utilized the tool that's built right into PowerPoint right now,, called Microsoft Design Services, but sometimes for some reason it doesn't work on the slide that you're trying to update. So I even figured out a way around that. Let's go take a look at it. So what I'm going to do is pop out of here and go into the PowerPoint that I was actually updating. And let me move myself out of the way here a little bit. As you can see, I have this slide. I'm going to fix that right now since I'm looking at it. How are you using your Outlook, Google, smartphone? And you'll see I got my little listing here, but notice from Home tab. First, got to make a little watch out. If you happen to be updating a PowerPoint file that is an old PPT file, you probably want to do at very start Save As to one of the newer PPTX files, because I've noticed that I think with the just PPT files, Design Ideas doesn't even work. It just stays grayed out. But with the newer version it'll update it so that you can use this. Now watch what happens here though when I click on Design Ideas. It's working to make a new thing, but says no ideas for this slide. Now let's go up to the one right above it though. Watch what happens here with this one. So this one's given me some pretty cool looking little options here to do an update, and that one looks sort of cool. Let's look at this one. So if I click on that, you'll see it actually gives a different way to look at this slide. Now of course, if you don't like it, you can just hit Undo and go back to the previous view. But what's neat about it is it gives you several options to look at ways to change and update the way your slides look. Design Ideas, it's cool. You can sort of walk through a PowerPoint that you've already had and play around and find ideas that look sort of the same theme and have similar design ideas inside of it, but get some updated graphics. But now going back to that one That doesn't work. Let me show you what I figured out to do. I am going to now make a new slide, and I'm just going to make it a title-only slide. Just put in a new slide inside of my program. But now watch what I'm going to do here. I am going to come in and just type the word email, and I'm going to click off of it. You got to click off of it for it to work. But look what it does. It now has given me some ideas here. And what you could do then is you could then take like the graphic like this and potentially do a snip or something like that to move that into the other slide. So like I could take this, maybe I'll even, uh, go so far as to get rid of the word email out of here and get rid of the little title box, and then I can use my snipping tool you know, come down here, type in snip, which will give you your Snipping Tool app. Second little bonus tip of this one: hit New. And now what I could do is I could just grab part of this graphic, hit Edit— oops, hold on— Edit, Copy. And now go back up to the slide where it wasn't working, right here, and do a quick little Ctrl+V. And now I can have a new updated graphic inside this slide. How are you using your phone? See? So I mean, it's that easy, and it works for a lot of different words. It doesn't work for every word, but taking your blank slide and, you know, like in this case with that, I'm going to get rid of that whole thing there, uh, take it out. Um, what you might want to do is add in and insert new slides periodically and just type in the word of what it is that you want. Let's try it. Let's try a few more. Home. Let's see what that does. And you got to click off of it, remember. And there you go, you got some graphics for home. Or let's try this one. Let's go up here and type calendar. And you got to click off of it, and it gives you a bunch of potential graphics that you could use for the word calendar. And if you get to ones you don't like, you can look for more, and it'll keep giving you some. Some will work, some won't, but it's a, it's a fun and interesting way to get out and find some newer graphics for the PowerPoints that you're working on to update the feel of those files to make them a little bit more contemporary, a little bit newer. All right, so I hope you like this one. Hope you find this one useful for all of you that are out designing and updating your PowerPoints. That was one of my things that I wanted to do for the pandemic is, you know, quickly update the look and feel of most of my programs so that the next time people see me on the road, they'll say, oh, Oh man, this PowerPoint doesn't look stale. And so with that, I would like to go back in and remember my other little tip. If you want to go from PowerPoint management mode to full PowerPoint presentation mode, do a Shift+Fn+F5 on your Windows keyboard. How about that? Thank you for your time. I am Randy Dean, the Email Sanity Expert. If you'd like to learn more about me and my programs, including my full-length online streaming and webinar programs, Go check out my website, randaldean.com. Hope you'll consider subscribing. We just passed 4,000 subscribers last weekend on the channel. And if you like the video, please give it a like, maybe make a comment. And if you'd like to get my little tip sheets with a whole bunch of stuff, including an updated viewer's guide to my YouTube channel, send me an email, randy@randaldean.com, and put YouTube PDF in the subject line. And I'll give you way too much stuff to make your life hopefully a little bit better. Thanks everybody.
