You can now turn a Microsoft Word document into a PowerPoint presentation

A while ago, Microsoft announced that it would soon include support for converting Word documents to PowerPoint presentations. If this sounds like a useful feature for your workflow, you’re in luck; Microsoft released the conversion tool this week today.

Making presentations easier with word conversion’

Microsoft has posted all the juicy details on the Tech Community website. The news came as no surprise, as Microsoft has hinted at this feature in the past. However, it is now available for public use.

There is a small catch; you can’t use the feature in the software version of Word yet. It’s currently only available in Word for the web, so you’ll need to use Microsoft’s cloud office service to convert Word documents to PowerPoint.

Unfortunately, you can’t grab a random Word document, run it through the converter and get a well-crafted PowerPoint presentation. The AI still needs some guidance on what the main conversation topics in your document are to generate a slide for each.

To do this, you need properly formatted headers in your Word document to guide the AI. Once that’s done, the AI will go through your document and pick keywords to design slides. It will even find relevant media to add to your slides.

If you’d like to give this feature a try, Microsoft has outlined some helpful steps to convert a Word document into a PowerPoint presentation:

1. Open a document you want to convert to a presentation in Word for the web.
2. Click File > Export > Export to PowerPoint Presentation.
3. If prompted, choose a design theme for your presentation.
4. Click Open Presentation to view the results in PowerPoint for the web.
5. The presentation is created and saved to the root of OneDrive on the user’s computer.

Unfortunately, the tool currently only supports English and cannot transfer media from your Word document to PowerPoint. However, you can manually add some once the AI has created the presentation.

Accelerate productivity with Microsoft’s AI

If you’ve always wanted to write your presentations yourself, you’re in luck. Microsoft now allows you to convert a Word document to a PowerPoint presentation, although the conversion quality is yet to be seen.

If you’d rather not hand the creation of PowerPoint presentations to a robot, there are still plenty of tools for people who create their slides manually. For example, there are handy PowerPoint templates that can speed up the creation process and give your slides a professional look.

Source: makeuseof