The new PowerPoint Designer and Morph features are here! See the evolution of PowerPoint.
Post by Kirk Koenigsbauer, corporate vice president for the Office team.
Office 2016 hit the market just two months ago and over the coming weeks we’re rolling out the next wave of monthly innovations for Office 365 subscribers. This month, PowerPoint leads the way with game changing tools that make it simple to build designer grade layouts and transitions. With this month’s feature update, we’re also introducing Office Insider, an ongoing preview program available to Office 365 subscribers.
Taking presentations to the next level
PowerPoint Designer and Morph are new intelligent tools that work for you by automating the creation of slides and presentations, helping everyone get more out of Office. With a cloud-powered recommendation engine and smart animation technology, these new PowerPoint capabilities help anyone create polished slides and captivating motion effects with just a few quick steps.
Introducing PowerPoint Designer
PowerPoint Designer allows anyone to create high quality professional slides within seconds. Just drop an image into your presentation and Designer provides you with several design ideas. Select your favorite and you’re done! This allows you to spend less time figuring out how to produce high quality designs and more time preparing for that key moment—your presentation.
This all works thanks to a powerful combination of automated design and smart image analysis. PowerPoint Designer was built in collaboration with professional graphic designers, who helped develop over 12,000 creative blueprints. Designer applies cloud intelligence to analyze and identify the most compelling portion of your images to determine which blueprints work best with your content. For example, if the visual contains a natural scene, Designer can zoom, crop and frame it. But if the image contains a chart, it focuses in on the relevant region to ensure the important data is highlighted. Designer then selects from the 12,000+ blueprints to provide multiple layout options to help you make the most of your image. The end result is a high quality and customized presentation—in seconds.
This first release of Designer will do amazing things, but it’s going to get even better with time. In the coming months, we will expand Designer to work with additional slide types.
Create cinematic motion with Morph
Morph creates cinematic motion by seamlessly animating between your slides. Morph doesn’t just animate regular text or images, it can animate 3-D shapes or be applied at a word or even character level, including text wrapping. Simply duplicate slides you want morphed together, move the objects based on how you want them to animate and click the Morph button under Transitions. You’ll be amazed with the quality of animations you create with just one click.
Exclusively available to Office 365 subscribers, PowerPoint Designer and Morph are premium authoring and editing features. PowerPoint Designer and Morph are available first in PowerPoint 2016 for Windows desktop and Windows Mobile, but expect to see these same features rolling out to other platforms in the coming months.
Collaboration and communication technology solutions make it possible for small businesses to compete successfully with much larger companies and to serve the needs of customers across town and around the world. Increasingly, mobility, social networking, and the cloud are essential elements for small businesses that want to remain competitive and thrive in today’s fast-paced global business environment.
As mobile computing becomes the standard for work and life worldwide, it offers small businesses new opportunities to share information with employees, partners, and customers, who can now work anywhere, at any time, and on any device and mobile platform. Social technology solutions are helping redefine how businesses communicate and collaborate—both internally and externally.
“Many businesses now let employees work from anywhere, provide cloud-based productivity tools so those workers can communicate and collaborate more effectively, and encourage them to use their own devices for work.”
Following the 7 tips in this eBook can help you improve communication and collaboration to make your small business more effective, competitive, and successful: EBOOK (PDF)
Multitask, review, design & more! The iPad Pro makes using Office apps an enjoyable, interactive experience. Get your free 30-day trial of Office 365 and start using the apps today.
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Sick of Calibri? You don’t have to stick with Office 365’s standard set of fonts in your documents or messages. It’s a snap to change the font of an individual email message or even the default font for all new email messages you create.
In individual messages, simply highlight the text you wish to change, and select a new font style from the menu.
To change the default font in Outlook 2013/2016:
•From the File tab, select Options.
•Select Mail.
•Click Stationery and Fonts.
•Make your desired changes to new mail messages, replying or forwarding messages, and/or composing and reading plain text messages.
•Click OK until you return to your mailbox.
To change the default font in Outlook on the Web:
•From your gear menu, select Options.
•Click Message format under the Layout menu.
•Make your desired changes in the Message font window.
•Click Save.
A private Customer Immersion Experience (CIE) was conducted for a company at Managed Solution headquarters today. CIE workshops are complimentary through the end of the year. Register for one today.
The Microsoft Customer Immersion Experience (CIE) is a hands-on introduction to Microsoft’s suite of productivity tools. A true-to-life user experience, CIE takes you through everyday business situations, such as working remotely, analyzing sales data and collaborating with coworkers, and lets you see how Microsoft products make it all easy, convenient and secure.
All products are setup and configured with representative (fictional) users and data, allowing real life scenarios to be instantly simulated.
The CIE is a great way to get hands on with the latest productivity tools including Office 365, SharePoint 2013, and Yammer, in an interactive, experiential and fun environment.
Upcoming CIE Workshops
12/01 Arizona: Microsoft Corporation, 60 E Rio Salado Pkwy #1200, Tempe, AZ 85281
12/17 Orange County: Microsoft Technology Center3 Park Plaza, Suite 1600, Irvine CA
12/17 San Diego: Managed Solution Headquarters 9655 Granite Ridge Drive, Suite 550 San Diego, CA
Integrated CRM solution helps Trek support local sales reps
Although it's a global leader in bicycles and related gear, Trek Bicycle maintains the spirit of a small company, from its close-knit, collaborative staff to the independent bike shops who sell Trek bikes and gear. Because it sells through a network of smaller, independently owned retailers rather than big-box sporting goods stores, Trek's success depends on close, supportive relationships between its local sales reps and the owners of the stores. Trek uses Microsoft Dynamics and Microsoft Dynamics CRM to support their local sales reps and build relationships with their customers.
Read customer success stories to learn how Managed Solution helps businesses implement technology productivity solutions.
For information on deploying Microsoft Dynamics CRM in your organization, please call us at 800-257-0691.
Wednesdays With Will: Empowering Your Sales Team With Microsoft Dynamics CRM
By William Marchesano, Technology Advisor & Evangelist
As a Business Owner, VP of Sales, or Sales Manager you are heavily invested in the level of success your sales team can reach and rightfully so. If they are unable to close enough business in a set period of time it may lead to the downsizing of your overall staff. If they are greatly exceeding company goals, this can lead to challenges for your operations teams to meet the expectations of your clients. It may also lead to a secondary adverse effect on your customer service team in keeping current customers happy. It seems to be a delicate balancing act in this ecosystem you call your business.
Last time we discussed a smarter way to market, “smarketing’, by using Microsoft Dynamics CRM. The methods highlighted in last week’s post were suggestions for improving lead generation. Leads generated by your marketing team will become new opportunities for your sales team. Once you have entered these opportunities into Dynamics CRM, you can now properly usher them through your company’s defined sales process, increasing your probability for a win. If the opportunity is lost, you now have the ability to analyze why it was lost as to make corrections for other future opportunities. If you are looking for a way to increase the value of an opportunity, Dynamics CRM makes it simple to set up upsell and cross-sell opportunities. Possibly the most important aspect of opportunity tracking is forecasting. Proper forecasting plays a huge role in scheduling and allocating the proper resources on the operations side of the house. From a management prospective, it may be used to dictate whether to hire more people and if so for which role or roles.
Something that may seem so basic but is often overlooked is the handoff from marketing to sales. The reason the lead, from marketing, became an opportunity, for sales, is because they followed a certain path or journey that qualified them. Understanding how and why they arrived is imperative to understanding how your business can solve their challenge and gauging the timing for a decision to be made. When you leverage a tool such as Dynamics CRM, you are able to align your sales and marketing departments, in turn making each much more effective.
From a sales aspect, contact management has been the most fundamental use of a CRM system over the past 20-30 years. It gives you a searchable, centralized location to keep information about an organization, contact information for its people, as well as a place to log notes from phone calls, emails, appointments, and other interactions. Most systems will also provide you a follow-up component that alerts you of when to reach out to a particular contact. These functions are highly valuable when prospecting and/or managing multiple accounts. With Dynamics CRM you can add more meaning to the way you follow up with prospects and clients through social selling. The Microsoft Insights and Social Engagements components of Dynamics CRM gives sellers this ability in two different ways. Microsoft Insights pulls information about an organization (size, annual revenue, industry, etc.), its people (phone number, email address, role, etc.), and recent news (mergers, acquisitions, expansions, etc.) from multiple social media platforms. By leveraging Social Engagements, you can captures information about what is trending on social media. This is helpful for learning about a change occurring in your prospect or client’s business without them having to tell you.
Most sales professionals are always on the go so most of what we have discussed would not be as useful unless it was easily accessible “out in the wild”. Dynamics CRM can be used on a variety of mobile devices such as tablets and cell phones. This allows you to access information already entered into the system as well as the ability to input additional information. I’m really excited about the next iteration, Microsoft Dynamics 2016, which will take advantage of Cortana’s search by voice capabilities.
We covered quite a bit today regarding the capabilities of Microsoft Dynamics CRM sales automation and there is still so much more such as the ability to instantly generate proposals through the system and save documents pertaining to accounts. I can go on forever about how you can empower your sales team with this platform but I digress. As always, I encourage you to reach out to me to discuss these topics in deeper detail. I hope you enjoyed and found this week’s article informative. If you’re interested in some how-to related CRM material, check out blogs by my colleague Ben Ward here. Till next time…
About the author:
Will has over 16 years of experience in business development, team management, and project management. Will has worked at Managed Solution for over four years and is currently advising businesses on best CRM practices and implementations. Will’s focus is on process improvement and analytics specializing in Customer Relationship Management (CRM). Will is a Microsoft Certified Professional, with certifications in Presales Technical Specialist – Microsoft Dynamics CRM 2013, Sales Specialist- Microsoft Dynamics CRM 2013, Microsoft Dynamics CRM 2015 Application, Sales Specialist- Office 365, Sales Specialist- SMB Infrastructure and Sales Specialist- Datacenter.
For information on deploying Microsoft Dynamics CRM in your organization, please call us at 800-257-0691.
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Nonprofit moves to Office 365 and SharePoint Online to improve income generation
As written by Fiona Knower, Office Manager, British Ballet Organization as written on https://blogs.office.com
The British Ballet Organization (BBO) trains students and teachers in the globally respected BBO syllabi. As a nonprofit organization, we organize courses and events locally, nationally, and internationally to enrich lives through the medium of dance. Working on these events was a challenge because we had limited collaboration tools. We had a shared file server running on an old PC in the office, and I worried about losing teacher, student, and event management information if a backup failed. When we worked on documents, versioning was always a nightmare, so we ended up sending drafts to one another by email. It wasn’t very efficient.
Then we heard about Microsoft Office 365. I saw how we could use SharePoint Online and team sites as a security-enhanced, easily accessible collaboration platform. We deployed Office 365 and now we can coauthor documents simultaneously, track versions accurately, and store our data with robust security in the cloud. Because we can access our work from any PC, laptop, or mobile phone- wherever we have an Internet connection-we are no longer restricted to meetings in the office to get things done. With Office 365, we can work more productively on more events and reinvest more money into the organization!”
Read customer success stories to learn how Managed Solution helps businesses implement technology productivity solutions.
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