Problems with Intelligent Services in Office 365

Repeated prompts to turn Intelligent Services on

• You insert a picture into PowerPoint
• The Design Ideas pane opens on the right of the screen
• It contains a message like "Turn on intelligent services to let PowerPoint automatically create more impactful slides for you" and below that are buttons marked Turn on and Not now.
• It's getting tiresome to have to dismiss this pane every time you insert a picture.

This happens when PowerPoint Designer is enabled but Office Intelligent Services is disabled. Designer relies on Intelligent Services to perform its magic, so it complains when Intelligent Services is disabled.

You'll need to do one of two things:

• Disable PowerPoint Designer if you don't want to use it. Go to File | Options | General and under PowerPoint Designer, remove the checkmark next to Automatically show me design ideas. Or ...
• Enable Office intelligent services if you do want to use PowerPoint Designer. Go to File | Options | General and under Office intelligent services, put a checkmark next to Enable services and under PowerPoint Designer, make sure there's a checkmark next to Automatically show me design ideas.

Unable to turn Intelligent Services on

If a user is unable to enable Intelligent Services (the option is grayed out or is entirely missing), it may be due to a Group Policy setting.

If Online Content options are set to Do not allow Office to connect to internet, the option to enable Intelligent Services will not be present (since Intelligent Services requires access to the internet). Changing this policy setting to Allow and rebooting the computer should make the option to enable Intelligent Services available again.

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