Supercharge Your Business with Microsoft Tools: Create Stunning Documents and Presentations
Create Stunning Documents and Presentations In today’s competitive business landscape, building a strong brand is essential for standing out and gaining customer loyalty. Microsoft 365 offers a suite of tools that empower businesses to create professional and visually appealing materials, helping to establish and enhance your brand identity. With Microsoft PowerPoint and Word, businesses can produce polished presentations and documents that reflect your brand's professionalism and creativity. PowerPoint's pre-designed templates and themes make it easy to create visually appealing slides, while features like transitions, custom animations, and video embedding add a dynamic touch. Discover Powerpoint’s Secret Weapons PowerPoint remains a cornerstone of presentation software, trusted by millions worldwide. Its intuitive interface and easy-to-use features make it an ideal choice for small business owners. With a plethora of pre-designed templates and themes, creating visually appealing slides is straightforward. You can use a range of features to create stunning presentations like: Transitions to add smooth, dynamic transitions between slides. You can choose from nearly 50 different types from subtle, to exciting ones, and to really dynamic types with added effects. Custom Animations to add personality and emphasize specific slide elements. You can tune your animations with triggers and effects so that objects in slides appear only when you want them to. You can also embed videos from your device, or even online videos to make your presentation more engaging. This feature, like Transitions and Custom Animations, help make presentations appear more sophisticated and show off your company’s brand in the best light. You can even convert your presentation into a video for on-demand viewing with Export to Video. Your customers, prospects, or partners can then view important content at their convenience – perfect for you to convey follow-up materials after a sales presentation, for example. Speaking of sales presentations. With PowerPoint Live, you can present your slides directly within a Microsoft Teams meeting, so you don’t need to switch between different apps or share your entire screen. You can see your slides, notes, and the audience all in one view so you have full control while you’re presenting. Keeping an eye on the room while presenting is especially important for high-stakes presentations and with PowerPoint Live, everything happens seamlessly within Teams. Press the Designer 1 button in the ribbon to get additional design features: Automatic Design Suggestions to give you slide templates and designs that you choose from to fit your brand to achieve a polished, professional look. Designer works in the background to analyze the content and provide design suggestions like layout options, color schemes, and relevant images. With Smart Layouts, Designer can detect elements like pictures, charts, and tables, and suggest cohesive layouts that make your slides look their best. Visual Enhancements can transform text-heavy slides into engaging visuals using SmartArt, making your presentation pop with imagery. Designer can even recommend high-quality photos and icons from the Microsoft 365 library with the Contextual Images and Icons feature. Format Your Documents Like a Pro For small businesses, documents produced in Word makes you look more professional and grown up. Word provides a wide range of templates for various document types, including reports, proposals, and invoices, ensuring that your business documents always look professional. One of the most powerful features in Word is Real-time Co-authoring, which we first introduced in 2013. It allows multiple people to work on a document simultaneously, which is incredibly beneficial for small businesses and teams who want to work together while meeting short deadlines. Here’s how it works as it enables live collaboration while ensuring your company looks its best. When a document is stored in OneDrive or SharePoint, multiple users can open and edit it at the same time. Changes are visible in real-time, so you can see what others are working on as they do it. Word automatically saves versions of the document, so you can track changes and revert to previous versions if needed. Authors and Reviewers can make Comments and Chat with one another and discuss changes directly within the document. Best of all, Co-authoring works on Word for the web, desktop, and mobile apps. So team members can collaborate from anywhere, using any device and get work done much faster with Co-authoring. Other popular features that come with Word include: Themes, which provide a coordinated set of fonts, colors, and effects to apply to your entire document to make it look consistent and visually pleasing. Charts and Tables: you can insert and customize charts and tables to present data clearly. This is useful for reports and proposals. Watermarks: To enhance document security and branding, you can add text or image watermarks (like “Confidential” or your company logo) to the background of your document. Themes, Charts and Tables, and Watermarks can make your document stand out with very little effort from the author. Word makes it easy for your work to shine, and start building a beautiful company brand. Export to PDF: To ensure your document cannot be edited and stays as you intended, you can turn it into a PDF. Doing so is easy. Just go to the “File” menu and choose PDF under “Save As”. This process ensures that your document looks the same on any device and is easy to share or print. Your work stays the way you intended it to look. Just like in PowerPoint, press the Designer 2 button on the Ribbon to access more capabilities that can make your document more visually appealing and professionally-looking: Enhance the appearance and consistency of your document though Design Suggestions, which provides a variety of design themes and layout options that you can apply to your document to make it more visually appealing. Formatting Consistency, which automatically identifies and fixes formatting inconsistencies in your document, ensuring a uniform look throughout. Smart Recommendations: Based on the content of your document, Designer suggests relevant design elements, such as fonts, colors, and styles. Add Microsoft 365 Copilot And Do Even More If you already have a Microsoft 365 business or enterprise plan, you can add Copilot at an additional cost to unlock an AI-powered image generator in both PowerPoint and Word. With this powerful AI feature, you can match the capabilities of a creative agency designer instantly. Even without any design skills or experience, you can create images ready for internal or external use at the press of a button. For small businesses, this means saving valuable time and resources while achieving beautiful results without needing to hire a designer. Simply ask Copilot to generate images to your specifications, and you can enhance your slides or documents. Use it to create background images, hero images, or illustrations that better convey your points in a long document. AI image generation can help your Marketing and Branding, to create unique and engaging visuals for marketing campaigns, social media posts, and promotional materials. This can help SMBs stand out and attract more customers. Or use it for Customer Engagement, with personalized images for customer communications like newsletters and emails, enhancing customer satisfaction and loyalty. Lastly, you can use it for Product Ideation: whether it's to storyboard your customer experience or to strategize a new product launch, you can ask AI image generation to visually communicate your out-of-the box business ideas with ease. Get Started: Do Beautiful Work Today If you haven’t already, try the many free features in PowerPoint like Transitions, Animations, Embedded Video, and Icon Library in PowerPoint to amp up your slides. In Word, you can also access popular features like Themes, Charts & Tables, and Watermarks to make polished-looking documents. Copilot unlocks additional design tools in PowerPoint and Word to offer small business owners the professional tools they need to create stunning presentations and documents with the magic of AI. By leveraging AI image generation, you can make beautiful images for your clients and partners, while saving time and budget. Don’t let a lack of design skills or resources hold you back—try out these Microsoft tools and experience the difference they can make for your business. [1] Designer is only available in the online versions of PowerPoint and Word. [2] Designer is only available in the online versions of PowerPoint and Word.How to create custom templates that work well with Designer in PowerPoint
Today we announced that Designer now works with a company or organization's branded templates! Now AI recommendations on layout, designs, colors, and fonts can help employees save time and keep them on-brand while adhering to your company's brand guidelines. So how can the brand managers, designers, and IT admins make their custom templates work well with Designer?Introducing Office – Your new go-to mobile app for getting work done
February 19, 2020 Update: The Office app has now reached general availability and is free for anyone to download through the App Store for iOS and the Google Play Store for Android. Please read our latest post on the Microsoft 365 Blog for more information. Today we are excited to share a new vision for how people get work done on a phone – a new app that’s ambitious enough to simply be called Office. Download for Android (public preview) Update on iOS public preview: Per the terms of Apple’s TestFlight program, the public preview for iOS apps is restricted to a maximum capacity of 10,000 users. We saw extraordinarily strong interest in the Office app and reached the capacity limit for iOS within a few hours of today’s announcement. We are thrilled and flattered by the interest and look forward to reaching general availability of the app for everyone to use. The public preview for the Android version of the Office app is not subject to the same download limits and continues to be available for download. Vision for working on mobile devices We all rely on mobile devices more than ever for getting work done whether that’s at a job, at home, or at school. There are many great mobile productivity apps available such as Word, Excel, and PowerPoint to help us do that, however we still believe an opportunity exists to create a more mobile-centric experience for these types of apps. The new Office mobile app represents our vision for what a productivity solution would look like if first built for mobile devices. In designing this new experience, we first considered how people’s expectations differ when using a phone versus a computer, so we set out to optimize for simplicity, efficiency, and common mobile needs. Next, we explored how to better incorporate the unique ways that people input data and create content on a mobile device – essentially turning the phone form factor from a liability for doing work into an asset. Finally, we needed to ensure that this app met the high expectations people already have for Office solutions. This solution should feel familiar to the people that know and rely on them today and instill a sense of confidence that they can accomplish their work with the high degree of quality and security that they have come to know. A new mobile productivity experience We are excited to introduce to our solution to this endeavor. The Office app provides a simple, integrated experience that puts the tools you need for working on a mobile device at the forefront of the experience. We started by combining the existing Word, Excel, and PowerPoint mobile apps into a single app. Doing so brings all of your Office documents together in one place, reduces the need to switch between multiple apps, and significantly reduces the amount of space used on your phone compared to multiple installed apps. We then added new capabilities that harness the strengths of mobile devices, such as the camera, to enable you to create content in uniquely mobile ways. Finally, we added a new Actions Pane that helps you accomplish many of the common mobile tasks you need to do all from one place. Whether using it for personal or professional reasons, Office is designed to be your go-to app for getting work done on a mobile device. Let’s take a closer look at what makes it different: Simple, integrated experience Word, Excel, and PowerPoint all in one app with all of the mobile features you already know and use. Easily get to recent and recommended documents stored in the cloud or on your device, or search for documents across your organization if using a work account. Easy access to Sticky Notes to jot down quick reminders and ideas. Create content in uniquely mobile ways Snap a picture of a document and turn it into an editable Word file with the press of a button. Transform a picture of a table into an Excel spreadsheet so you can work with the data. Let PowerPoint help you design a presentation by simply selecting the pictures you want to use from your phone. Create automatically enhanced digital images of whiteboards and documents with Office Lens features integrated into the app. A new Actions pane for common tasks you may encounter on a mobile device Create PDFs with your camera, using photos on your device, or from Office documents. Sign PDFs by simply using your finger. Scan QR codes to open files and links. Easily transfer files between your phone and computer or share instantly with nearby mobile devices. Now available in public preview The Office mobile app is available in public preview starting today for Android and iOS*. It is super easy to get started with the app – anyone can download and use it for free and we don’t require a sign-in to start using it. However, logging in with a work, school, or personal Microsoft Account gives you access to your files stored in the cloud, and you can sign in with more than one account to make it easy to get to all of your documents in one place. The app is currently available only on phones, although we will bring this experience to tablets as well. Since this is a public preview, we are very interested in hearing from you about what you like, don’t like, or would like to see in the app so we encourage you to provide feedback through the “Help & Feedback” tool under Settings. We continue to work hard on making the app an even more powerful tool for getting work done, so keep an eye out for more to come with Office. We know many people are probably wondering, what does this mean for the current mobile apps? In short, we will continue to support and invest in the existing Word, Excel, and PowerPoint mobile apps. We are proud that millions of people use and depend on these apps every day and we believe everyone should decide which experience works best for them on their phones. However, we do encourage everyone to give the new Office app a try – we think it will change your expectations for what you think a mobile productivity experience should be. No other app combines the simplicity, efficiency, and capability for getting work done on a phone quite like Office. Get started now on Android and stayed tuned for further updates on availability for iOS*! * Please note: Per the terms of Apple’s TestFlight program, the public preview is capped at 10,000 users. We reached this limit on the first day of availability and the public preview for iOS is no longer available to new users.
Add and Explore Office Add-ins easily with our new entry point
We’re excited to announce that a more easy-to-access entry point for Office Add-ins is now available online. By accessing the new entry point in Word, Excel, and PowerPoint, you’ll have an upgraded experience without worrying about managing all your add-ins or choosing the fit right add-in among the thousands available in AppSource and the Office marketplace.Office Apps for Windows 10 Mobile: End of Support for Windows Phones
The Office apps for phones using Windows 10 Mobile – Word, Excel, PowerPoint, OneNote -- will reach end of support on January 12, 2021. On that date, app users will no longer receive security updates, non-security hotfixes, free assisted support options or online technical content updates from Microsoft. This decision follows the earlier announcement that support for Windows 10 Mobile ends on December 10, 2019. Microsoft remains committed to providing a great Office experience on phones for consumer, commercial, education, and government users through the iOS and Android apps which continue to be supported. You can get the Office iOS and Android apps through the app stores for those platforms. What does end of support mean? The mobile apps for Office are governed by Microsoft's Modern Lifecycle Policy. Microsoft provides bug fixes and security fixes to support the product experience through the end of this lifecycle, known as the product's end of support. On January 12, 2021, you will no longer be able to install these Office apps on phones using Windows 10 Mobile and Microsoft will no longer provide the following support: Technical support for issues Bug fixes for issues that are discovered Security fixes for vulnerabilities that are discovered. What are my options? If you already have the apps installed before the end of support date, the apps will continue to work. However, because of the lack of security updates, we strongly recommend that if you wish to use Office on a phone you transition to the latest Microsoft Office apps on an iOS or Android phone. Not only will you find Word, Excel, PowerPoint, and OneNote apps in the iOS and Android app stores, you will also find new innovations such as the Office app which provides a simple, integrated experience with Word, Excel, and PowerPoint all in one app with all the mobile features you already know and use.
