AI tools for efficient slide deck design

July 22, 2024 6:42 AM

What AI-based tools can reduce time-consuming fiddling with design and layout in Powerpoint? Ideally, it'd be great to take a bunch of fairly standard slide content, either in text format or already on (ugly) slides, and effortlessly redo it in a more elegant and usable design. Canva and MS's native Slide Design tools promise this, but don't seem to deliver. What else is there?

Surely AI can help with this one little thing on its way to taking over the world, right?

The slide content in question is word-heavy but otherwise unremarkable: some large text blocks, some images, some images with small captions, some outlines, some tables or multi-blocks of text side-by-side, etc. Some text that would be more engaging with a decorative image alongside, if the AI could auto-select one.

A lot of work goes into fitting and adjusting the content layout for usability: resizing fonts and reshaping boxes to present varying quantities of text in pleasing, readable arrangement on the page, adding and reducing spaces between lines, cropping and moving images to fit, centering and un-centering things, choosing clearer fonts to distinguish different types of information, etc. No weird design criteria at work, just the basic ones of making the information easy to follow and reasonably harmonious-looking.

Microsoft's Slide Design tool should help with this, but in practice just generates slides full of frilly graphic elements while, if anything, worsening the design of the content by forcing it to fit into their weird boxes and unnecessarily fussy layouts. Canva stock designs are pretty, but also seem to require extensive manual adjustment to fit new content, particularly if there's any change at all to the underlying structure of the information.

Obviously there are various AI products promising everything and more on this list, but I'd love suggestions for tools that MeFites have actually used with success. Thanks in advance!

posted by Bardolph to Computers & Internet (9 answers total)

i've only seen one slideshow made that way thus far: the worst ever. seriously

Ideally, it'd be great to take a bunch of fairly standard slide content, either in text format or already on (ugly) slides, and effortlessly redo it in a more elegant and usable design.
add some color, even just a light tan shows you're putting in effort
posted by HearHere at 7:02 AM on July 22

There's no AI to it but what you're describing is in many ways what the beamer package for LaTeX is trying to do. But that means, duh, using LaTeX.
posted by GCU Sweet and Full of Grace at 7:14 AM on July 22 [1 favorite]

It's basically the opposite of AI, but I was also thinking of LaTeX. (It wouldn't auto-select images for you, though.)
posted by demi-octopus at 7:18 AM on July 22

I have had some luck with the Canva templates for slides rather than the Canva AI for slides. Perhaps that will give you better results. It does involve looking at a lot of templates and there are SO MANY.
posted by Mo Nickels at 7:46 AM on July 22

Templates are the solution, not AI. Agree with the above that there are tons available from MS direct or some place like Canva.
posted by fiercekitten at 7:53 AM on July 22 [2 favorites]

Three quarters of this is to find the right template. The other quarter is to learn how to use it effectively.
posted by rd45 at 8:03 AM on July 22

Response by poster: Trying not to threadsit, but templates ime are a nightmare owing to the following problems:
-this slide has 4 lines of text in a box, the next slide has 14 lines of text in the same box and after manually changing the font the line length now looks weird and hard-to-read with the smaller font, here take 10 minutes fiddling with the width and then manually resizing the picture also, to make space, until it looks good

-this Canva template includes 3 very conventional layouts but author's slides 6-14 have completely different info structures that cannot be forced into those layouts (e.g. 3 columns not 2, 4 comparisons not 5, need to add a big box somewhere for this chart). So take 20 min/slide copy-pasting and ham-handedly kludging a new layout for each one. Or take 60 minutes poring over the samples to try to find an appropriate layout in another template, then another 60 minutes trying to merge the completely disparate formats and visual design.

-this layout is OK in the sample but something about the shape/line break placement of the new text makes it look "off" somehow, spend 20 minutes experimenting and resizing and find it still looks clunky

-this section heading is one word over the available length but shrinking the font makes it look too small. Manually go in and resize the box to permit two lines, realize the line spacing for heading fonts is now off (or for Canva, realize that it's incredibly hard to adjust line spacing at all), spend 30 minutes manually screwing around with it and fail to find a solution that looks good

AI can predictively generate pictures of Marvel superheroes in the style of Michelangelo, is there really no AI that was trained on a bunch of reasonably well-designed .ppt layouts and can merge in new content accordingly?
posted by Bardolph at 9:06 AM on July 22

Ok, so templates are one of each type of slide and then you copy as many of the ones you like as you want. You may know this but you say "the authors slide 6 to 14" or something, you don't use the ones you don't like... Sorry if I've misunderstood you, but it sounded like you were trying to put your first slide on their first and then your second on their second etc
posted by Iteki at 1:00 PM on July 22

Response by poster: @Iteki, apologies for being unclear. I do know how a template works, but even with the 4-15 stock layouts in a template deck, I find that variable-length, image-rich text content often can't be dropped effortlessly into one of the stock formats without extensive manual tweaking and sometimes full redesign (since adding or substantively resizing one extra element throws off the visual balance/spacing of everything else on the slide).
posted by Bardolph at 3:28 AM on July 23 [1 favorite]