If you're using PowerPoint 2003, installed the PowerPoint 2003 April 2011 Public Update, and experienced the background images issue identified in the Support article relating to our PowerPoint 2003 April 2011 Public Update, the Microsoft Office Sustained Engineering Team now has a fix for you.

For more information about the fix, go to http://blogs.technet.com/b/office_sustained_engineering/archive/2011/04/23/issues-after-installing-powerpoint-2003-update-kb2464588.aspx.

We wanted to let you know about this issue, but we're just the messenger. So if you have any questions, please leave them in the Comments section on the site above rather than here, so that you can get the quickest answer from the Sustained Engineering folks.

And we apologize if this issue affected you.

-- Erik Jensen

This is the seventh in a series of quick video tips for business managers using PowerPoint by guest blogger Bruce Gabrielle, author of Speaking PowerPoint.

Here's a quick way to choose colors so your PowerPoint slides will look more professional, even if you're not a graphic designer.

-- Bruce Gabrielle

If you haven't yet, head over to the new SlideFest site, submit your best presentation for a chance to win a trip to TEDActive in Palm Springs or a copy of Office 2010 for PC/Mac and a Kinect, and learn a ton by seeing what to do and what not to do when creating a PowerPoint presentation (including these great tips and tricks).

On the "don't" side, here's one that even PowerPoint experts can learn from--don't inadvertently distract from your message by using too many animations and transitions.

In modern business-speak, an "elevator pitch" is one in which you make your point in the time it takes to ride an elevator to your destination. Now you can expand your PowerPoint capabilities in that same elevator trip with the new PowerPoint Elevator Pitch video series.

In the series debut, find out how to easily give your audience another dynamic information source by adding a video to your presentation.

This is the sixth in a series of quick video tips for business managers using PowerPoint by guest blogger Bruce Gabrielle, author of Speaking PowerPoint.

Great magicians can make things appear before your very eyes. Now it's your turn to be magical, by creating dozens of titled slides in PowerPoint in mere seconds. Here's how!

-- Bruce Gabrielle

Today's the day to start submitting your favorite presentations for a chance to win a trip to Palm Springs to attend TEDActive. The contest is a part of SlideFest, an effort to show you how to create a great presentation, and how to create a lousy presentation, with tips to avoid the latter. Like this tip, for instance, about the common practice of over-using bullet points:

This is the fifth in a series of quick video tips for business managers using PowerPoint by guest blogger Bruce Gabrielle, author of Speaking PowerPoint.

Tables with rounded corners are friendlier, more contemporary, more web 2.0. But you can't create them automatically. Here's how you can achieve this effect using a handful of workarounds that include shapes, gradient colors, and background fills.

-- Bruce Gabrielle

Here at the PowerPoint blog, we want to help you make your presentations visual, engaging, and memorable. Not text-heavy and boring. To help you, in essence, become a great storyteller. Even (especially?) if your story is about bacon.

We also want to give you a chance to win a trip to TEDActive or a copy of Office 2010 for PC/Mac and a Kinect.

To help you create memorable, dynamic presentations, and to show you what other people are doing in their quest to design interesting content for their audiences, we're introducing SlideFest.

Here's a fun slide deck, especially since Major League Baseball is once again upon us, on whether baseball is still America's favorite pastime. What do you think? Share your $.02 on the Office Facebook page, or on the PowerPoint Facebook page.

The deck is posted on docs.com, a place where you can create and share PowerPoint, Word, and Excel documents with your friends on Facebook and elsewhere. This deck relies on hyperlinking in PowerPoint. Here's how to do that yourself.

We see a lot of questions about how to wrap text around a picture or a shape in PowerPoint. And it isn't easy (though we do have articles for PowerPoint 2010 and PowerPoint 2007 that discuss admittedly complicated workarounds to achieve the wrapping effect).

Since it's hard and awkward to do, we see more comments from people who are unhappy about it than from people who say they find it helpful.

But PowerPoint works best when it has less text. A few keywords. Not enough to wrap. This is an issue that we here at the PowerPoint Blog feel passionately about.