We listen to what you have to say, so we know that many of you want to use both portrait (shown here as image 1) and landscape slide orientation (image 2) in the same presentation. It makes sense, and presentations with both orientations look great.

And while we don't like to deliver news that you might not want to hear, a single PowerPoint presentation can't contain both. It has to be one or the other. Hopefully, we saved you some time by just coming out and saying that.  

Now for the good news - there's a workaround that you can use to make it look like one presentation contains both landscape and portrait orientation. And even better, your audience will never know the difference. We know it's not an ideal solution, but hopefully it will help. Here's how it works:

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My last post had a screen shot of a nice slide in it. In the text of my post I explained how create that slide, but the lack of clear, visual step by step instructions may have obscured just how easy it is to create slides like that in PowerPoint 2007. In this post we'll explain a little more about layouts and give you the step by step with screen shots this time. Custom & Built-In Layouts PowerPoint has a new feature called Custom Layouts. This feature lets you define the types of slides you...

Special guest post today from Jason Schneekloth, Program Manager for PowerPoint Tables PowerPoint Tables have been given a major revision with this release of Office. We have put a great deal of work into Tables this release in order to combat many of the pain points users had in the past when working with PowerPoint Tables. To show off how things have changed for the better and the new features of PowerPoint Tables, let’s take a look at the updated ‘Insert Table’ In the above image we see that the...

Today's post about fitting pictures into PowerPoint slides is by author Bruce Gabrielle.

Ever have this problem? You have a great picture for your PowerPoint slide, but it fits awkwardly on the page, leaving a big gap of white space. This looks really amateurish.

What do you do? Keep reading....

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In Office 2007, we significantly improved the rendering quality of static content. Users could quickly and easily enhance shapes, pictures, and other content with effects such as bevels, soft edges, and reflections. For Office 2010, we switched our focus to enhancing dynamic content - animations, transitions and video. To accomplish this, we rebuilt the core rendering engine using DirectX 9.0. As a result, you’ll notice that PowerPoint 2010 is improved in four major ways: Improved Slide Show Performance...

Thanks for your interest in the Office SmartArt graphics. You've reached an expired content page. Please visit the below links on Office.com for more on how to create and use SmartArt in Office 2013: Create a SmartArt graphic Animate your SmartArt graphic Change the color of a shape, style, shape border, or entire SmartArt graphic Choose a SmartArt graphic Keyboard shortcuts for SmartArt graphics Video: Animate charts and SmartArt

Happy to announce that all 165 templates created by PowerPoint MVP Julie Terberg are now available as free downloads at Office.com. You can use these templates as-is, or unlock your inner designer (reproduction steps appear in each template's Notes pane in PowerPoint). This is a sequel of sorts; we created PPT157 on the first set of Terberg's templates and, well, you don't mess with success.

See more about the project including a video showcase at http://www.bit.ly/ppt165.

And see how one office worker uses these templates:

You can find out more about Julie by visiting her website, terbergdesign.com.

--Doug Thomas and Eric Schmidt

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Looking for a 2012 calendar that you can use in PowerPoint? You're in luck.

Just in time for the new year, 2012 calendar templates for PowerPoint are now here. And as always, they're free. Read on to find out how to download yours today.

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Yesterday Microsoft announced that the Office team has reached the technical preview engineering milestone for Microsoft Office 2010.  We now kick-off the Technical Preview program mentioned in our June 25 th posting.   The big effect that this will have on the PowerPoint Team Blog is that the team can start talking publically about what we’ve been working on over the past two-plus years.  As you can imagine, it is a very exciting time! Over the next few months, the blog will...

In today’s world, you often need to communicate with people in different locations who can’t get together in the same room. When you’re presenting, you want everyone to see your slide show at the same time -- whether they’re sitting next to you or joining on the phone from 10,000 miles away. PowerPoint 2010 makes it easy to present on the fly to anyone, anywhere. Just send a link, and in one click everyone you invite will be watching a synchronized view of your slide show in their browser. You’ll...