Slight departure from our typical topics, as today we say a fond farewell to Program Manager Intern Mike Krieger. He's headed back to school next week and we wish him all the best. We like to give interns work experience on "real tasks." The same kind of work they would get if they were full-time employees. In the best case they'll get some feature work, somethiing that actually contributes to the shipping product. Mike pretty much hit the jackpot this summer. A quick review of his work that you...

There are a lot of ways to become a better presenter. Really, there are.  And some are simple and fun. One of the more fun ones is to watch a really good presenter... Friday the PowerPoint team had the pleasure of bringing Nancy Duarte to the Microsoft Silicon Valley Campus to reprise her keynote address: A Personal Journey . Duarte is the CEO and founder of Duarte Design a presentation focused design firm that counts some of the biggest technology companies as clients. They're the group that...

We break from our Winter break with a guest post from Chris Becker. Chris is one of our team's developers who wanted to share some observations on using 3D in PowerPoint 2007. The result is a quick set of steps you can walk through and explore the power of the new text and graphics engines. -RB Hi, I’m Chris from CoolBeans fame! 3D is one of the great new features of PowerPoint 2007, so I wanted to highlight what some of the new features are and how they can be used. For starters, how do you get...

Yes! Friday was the big day. We're all thrilled of course. There will be plenty of news coverage, but for now let us suggest the following links for the juicy details: The Microsoft Press Release - The official announcement. Jensen Harris: An Official User Interface Bog - Personal details about the ship party and box photos. Thanks to our readers, especially those who comment. We do listen. You do have impact. We hope it shows. Enjoy Microsoft Office 2007, and we can't wait to see what you do with...

The German PowerPoint 2007 Blog just celebrated it's one year anniversary! Their 100th entry was published on Sunday and the 101st entry was entered the same day German PowerPoint MVP Pia Bork! Check them out at http://www.ppt-user.de/blogger .  Yes, you'll need to speak German to read the blog, but there are lots of pictures and screen shots. Alles Gute zum Geburtstag! (Sure hope I got that right!) -Ric

There was a little confusion in the earlier posting about the recently announced Producer 2007 update. Although the name says "For Microsoft Office PowerPoint 2007" it still supports earlier versions of PowerPoint. To be clear, this is still a beta and the point of doing betas is to see if we can find any additional bugs we need to fix and to get your feedback. So please do share your thoughts after using the tool. The forum for Producer bug reporting and feedback is through the Microsoft Connect...

It does seem like we've been featuring a lot of material on Microsoft interns lately , but this one is a little different.  Hope you'll agree and enjoy one last post in the series. Kris Jordan recently interned with the Microsoft Visual Studio team. Like many technical and enthusiastic students, he runs a personal blog where he reports on his own experiences and  things that get his attention.  Recently he wrote a entry on prototyping software user interface and user experiences with...

Some quick notes about three special events of interest to PowerPoint users. Slideshare's 2nd Annual Best Presentation Contest Winner The results of Slideshare's 2nd annual presentation contest are in, and the winner is Jeff Brenman's Thirst , a compelling and very visual story about water.  The contest was judged by Guy Kawasaki , Bert Decker , Garr Reynolds and Nancy Duarte .  Read all about it and review the winners and other contest entries at http://www.slideshare.net/contest/results...

As promised last week , one more surprise. We wrap up our coverage of the PowerPoint 2008 Summer Interns with a real change of pace.  An audio roundtable discussion about their experiences on the team, what it was like being part of the development of the next version of PowerPoint, and what they've learned while they were here. It's a fun conversation, hope you enjoy it.  Click below to get to the podcast posting.   My PowerPoint Summer: Five Intern Tales   Pictured at left:...

We wind up up in our series of posts by PowerPoint's summer interns with Software Development Engineer Luiz Pereira.  But check back in a bit for one final intern surprise. My name is Luiz Pereira and I’m nearing the end of my internship as a Software Development Engineer (SDE) in PowerPoint’s Multimedia team. I’m currently finishing up my Master’s in Computer Science at Stanford (just a quarter left!), with a concentration in Human-Computer Interaction. I got my Bachelor’s...