For many years, Microsoft had the reputation of being a lumbering, deaf giant when it came to improving its products. Long-time PowerPoint users can look back and wonder why it took so long to add no-brainer features and fix glitches. It was one thing to have to wait three years in between product cycles, but it was in some ways more frustrating to feel as though your voice as a user was just not being listened to. If you had a great idea for PowerPoint, would anyone in Redmond even care? Further, could you even contact the product team?

UserVoice

That was the old Microsoft, and the new more nimble Microsoft, believe it or not, is actively listening to the average user and making changes based on user input. For real.

See that picture above? That is an always-on screen in the main hallway of the PowerPoint product development team. On the right-hand side is Twitter—yes, hashtag #PowerPoint and the engineers are going to see your post. But even better is the left-hand side which is a feed of powerpoint.uservoice.com, a site dedicated to wishlist features for PowerPoint that allows anyone to vote on proposed additions and to add your own requests for others to vote on.

Okay, but is this just a feel-good marketing ploy? No, it’s real, and the product development team is actively listening. I was reminded of this the other day when I dashed off a feature request to the product team directly (as a Microsoft MVP, I can get a little closer than the average user), and was gently reminded to post requests on uservoice. While Microsoft will always have final say, there is a legitimate sense of democracy afoot these days. Case in point is the just introduced game-changing feature called Morph. After years of begging for a PowerPoint answer to Keynote’s Magic Move, Microsoft finally instituted a similar feature that promises to ultimately trump Apple’s. Here’s the uservoice post on Morph.

The dev team not only actively reads requests, but often provides updates and comments. Notice the “completed” badge on the Morph request and the “Started” one on the below request.
In every presentation training I give, I always ask people to tell me their PowerPoint gripes, wishes and things that take longer than they feel they should. In some cases, I can show them a little-known feature to fix their problems, but other times, it will be up to Microsoft to make life easier for them. And uservoice is how to make that happen.

Oh, and always send crash reports to Microsoft. It helps everyone!

I recently returned from the annual Microsoft MVP Summit at Redmond HQ. Over the course of 3 days of intimate sessions with the PowerPoint and Office development teams, I got a preview of where Microsoft is headed in the coming years with their Office products including PowerPoint. And it’s very exciting.

More Frequent Updates

The largest shift is the one to a more nimble product improvement schedule. As users transition to the Office 365 subscription model, gone will be the days of major product releases every 3 years. Instead, subscription users will see frequent software updates. In fact, frequent and rapid product improvement is now a corporate mandate for the development teams, in addition to convergence of user experiences across all platforms and hardwares. The goal for the latter is for users to have the exact same experience using PowerPoint on the Mac, PC, tablet, mobile, online, etc. In terms of frequent product improvements, many of these will be small and often invisible (security patches, bug fixes), but some will be rather ground-breaking new features that promise to dramatically improve user efficiency and in the case of PowerPoint, the quality of user-created presentations.

Case in point is the news of two brand-new features due to be released in the next few weeks:

Morph

PowerPoint finally has an answer to Keynote’s Magic Move! The new feature called “Morph” does away with the need to actually animate objects by letting the user create a pair of slides with the desired beginning and end states of layout and design. By applying Morph as a slide transition, PowerPoint does the incredibly heavy lifting of interpolating the two states and applying an animation that morphs the beginning state into the next. The simplest example of this would be a title slide with a large centered logo. Starting on slide 2, that same logo is placed much smaller and in the corner. Simply apply the Morph transition and you’ll see that large logo shrink down and move to the corner. That’s it!

This really is a game changer that can not only save hours of animation time, but will also open up endless possibilities for creating more fluid, interactive and even Prezi-like slides that zoom in and out of content.

Designer

The second feature aims to put me and other professional presentation designers out of business. Well, not really, but it does attempt to provide automatic layout and design help for the average user. Designer takes user content (imagery and text) on a slide that has been placed into a Microsoft theme, and then based on that content, gives a number of layout suggestions that instantly turn lame slides into professionally designed ones. It’s much more than just applying different master layouts as it takes into account the actual image and text themselves and intelligently creates an entirely composed slide.

It seems as though Microsoft has been looking at the work of professional presentation designers over the years and has been actively thinking about how to provide that level of quality to the average user from within the program itself. Watch the demo video above and read more about these new features at the Microsoft Blog.

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Office Insider & Providing Feedback to Microsoft

Both Morph and Designer will, like many complex software features, arrive as first generations. Over time, I have no doubt that they will improve in functionality and depth of use. And with Microsoft’s new release philosophy, you most certainly will not have to wait three years to see those improvements. To get on the most inside of tracks with new releases, sign up for the new Office Insider Program which will give you the earliest access to new features. This is available only to Office 365 users.

And if you have feature requests and are interested in providing feeback directly to Microsoft, check in regularly at PowerPoint.uservoice.com where you request and vote on new features. Trust me, Microsoft actively monitors user feedback and as we can now see from Morph, does eventually listen!

The Microsoft Garage project lab has released Social Share, a free plug-in for PowerPoint to allow for instant social sharing of presentations and parts of presentations from within the program. You can share a whole deck or just a single composed slide.

Here’s a little video demo.