What is PowerPoint Designer? Now Design Suggestions
Last updated on May 28th, 2025
PowerPoint Designer is a feature introduced in PowerPoint 2016, designed to help users enhance their presentations effortlessly. It uses artificial intelligence to analyze slide content and provide layout suggestions that improve the visual appeal and clarity of the slides. Now it is incorporated into the Copilot experience and rebranded as “Design Suggestions”
What can PowerPoint Designer Do?
With PowerPoint Designer or Design Suggestions (someone also call it “Slide Starters”), users can quickly transform a basic PowerPoint slide into a polished, professional-looking design. When content such as an image or text is added to a slide, the tool automatically generates a variety of layout options, allowing users to choose the one that best suits their needs.
How Does PowerPoint Designer Work?
PowerPoint Designer starts automatically providing design suggestions when you add an image to a slide. For example, when you add a picture to your PowerPoint slide, PowerPoint will show you a number of slide layouts to choose from. These layouts will be as good as professionally designed slides. So, in other words, PowerPoint Designer gives you automatically generated layout suggestions using what can be deemed as an artificial intelligence.
Pro Tip: For more AI tools for presenters, check out our special article on AI PPT maker tools for creators and presenters.
Save Hours of Work with Automatic Design Suggestions
This simple PowerPoint feature can save you hours of work and give you a touch of the good stuff that professional PowerPoint templates or graphic designers provide. And all that in a few click. You need not to worry about making your slides look good, the legibility of your text or that perfect placement for your added content; as all that is taken care of automatically.
Unlike the previous PowerPoint Designer feature, the new rebranded feature Design Suggestions is part of Copilot which means that users with Microsoft 365 plans can use the feature, as this includes Copilot, and for Personal and Family plans, applying Design Suggestion will consume AI credits in the monthly quota.
Pick Layouts Suggestions for Photographic & Nonphotographic Images with Design Suggestions
PowerPoint Designer or Design Suggestions not only provides design suggestions when you add a photographic image but also for other kinds of images, such as perhaps a chart image. So, if you were to add a chart image to your slide, you will automatically get design suggestions with layouts that can perfectly reveal your chart with the best possible design. PowerPoint Designer can differentiate between photographic and non-photographic images and adjust layout suggestions accordingly.
Introduction to Design Suggestions (previously known as PowerPoint Designer)
The below video gives an overview of PowerPoint Designer and another excellent PowerPoint feature called Morph.
PowerPoint Design Suggestions Requirements
You will need an Office 365 subscription for PowerPoint Designer to work. Furthermore, since designer uses the internet, you will have to be online to get design suggestions.
Unfortunately, the design suggestions don’t work with custom themes, therefore, you will require a default PowerPoint theme. Moreover, your slides will require a Title or Title + Content slide layout.
To receive design suggestions, you will need to use pictures that are larger than 200×200 pixels belonging to JPG, PNG, BMP or GIF image formats.
You can make sure that PowerPoint Designer is enabled via File -> Options -> General -> Enable PowerPoint Designer.
FAQs
If you don’t want to get presentation ideas from PowerPoint Designer, you can disable it. To turn off PowerPoint Designer, go to PowerPoint Options -> General and uncheck the option Automatically show me design ideas under PowerPoint Designer section.
No, you can’t get ideas for shapes. Currently, PowerPoint Designer support images.
No, only Microsoft 365 plans with some form of Copilot AI can use Design Suggestions. Microsoft Personal and Family plans will consume AI credits.
