Ask for design ideas any time by choosing Design > Designer on the ribbon.
If Designer doesn't have any design ideas for you or you don't see the Designer button, there are a few possible reasons for that situation. Want to learn more about Designer? Check out Create professional slide layouts with Designer.
Select the dropdown and choose an option:
If no Design Ideas are available for you, a few things might be the cause. First of all:
-
Make sure you're connected to the Internet. Designer goes online to get its Design Ideas.
-
Use a theme that comes with PowerPoint (not a custom theme or one that you've downloaded from elsewhere).
Following are other problems and how to solve them:
No design ideas for slides with pictures
-
Make sure your slide has either the Title or Title + Content slide layout applied.
-
Don't use any additional objects or shapes on the same slide as your photo.
-
Use a maximum of four photos (.jpg, .png, .gif, or .bmp) per slide, and make sure they're larger than 200 × 200 pixels in size.
No design ideas for process-based slides
-
Make sure your slide has the Title + Content slide layout applied.
-
Don't use any additional photos, objects, or shapes on the same slide as your process text.
Because Designer is a relatively new service, it's still learning new tricks. If Designer can’t generate high-quality options for you, it won’t show any options at all. We're working hard to generate great design ideas for more varieties of your content.
And of course, if you don’t find Designer useful, you can turn it off by going to File > Options > General, and then clearing the box that says Automatically show me design ideas.
Someone else is editing
If you're co-authoring a presentation with someone else and more than one person is actively editing a single slide at one time, Designer won't give design suggestions on that slide.
However, as soon as only person is editing the slide, Designer begins offering design suggestions again once that person does an action (such as adding a photo) that Designer can respond to.
No design ideas for slides that have shapes or text boxes
Designer isn't able to suggest design ideas when a slide has a shape or text box drawn on it. You can have photos and you can have text in a placeholder.