PowerPoint Designer turns ugly slides into nice ones in two clicks

You've dumped a title and a few bullets onto a slide. It looks fine, but "fine" isn't going to wow anyone in the meeting. Designer (sometimes called Design Ideas) is PowerPoint's built-in helper that takes your contents and proposes polished layouts in seconds.

Turning it on

If Designer isn't appearing for you, switch it on first:

File → Options → General.
Scroll to PowerPoint Designer.
Tick Automatically show me design ideas and Automatically show suggestions when I create a new presentation.

Triggering it on demand

On any slide:

Go to the Design tab.
Click Designer (far right).

The Designer pane opens on the right, showing layout suggestions tailored to your content. Click any to apply. Don't like it? Click another. Want to revert? Press Ctrl + Z.

What Designer is good at

Photos — drop in a single image and Designer suggests beautiful full-bleed and split-screen layouts.
Bullet lists — turns three to seven bullets into clean icon lists, infographics, or timelines.
Numerical data — recognizes years, percentages, and quantities, then offers visual treatments.
Title slides — instantly upgrades a plain title with subtle accents.

What it's not great at

Heavy text slides — five paragraphs of body copy give Designer nothing to work with.
Custom corporate templates — Designer's suggestions sometimes don't match strict brand guidelines. If your company has a master template, lean on that first.
Low-resolution images — pixelated photos give pixelated suggestions.

The unsung feature: Recolor

While in the Designer pane, scroll past the layouts. There's a small Recolor section that proposes colour palettes derived from any image on your slide. Apply one and your title text, accents, and shapes all retint to match. Brilliant for keeping a deck visually coherent.

Privacy note

Designer sends slide content to Microsoft's servers to generate suggestions. If you're working on confidential material, it's worth knowing — and turning Designer off in Options for those decks. For day-to-day decks, it's a huge time saver.