STAMP is a free public beta that increases the accessibility of your presentations. With it, you can easily add closed captions to video and audio files, which boosts their impact for those with hearing disabilities. STAMP lets you create captions within PowerPoint or import existing industry standard Timed Text Mark-up Language (TTML) files. Head over to Holly Thomas' new post for details about STAMP and another accessibility-oriented beta add-in for Word called Save as DAISY.

STAMP is available for download starting today and works in all the languages Office currently supports around the world. 

In this post, we'll take a look at how to install it and how to use it. You can find full details in the article Sub-titling text add-in for Microsoft PowerPoint (STAMP), and also find download files and documentation at SourceForge.

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Last week, we looked at class presentations, and this week we're taking a look at project plans as part of our 3-part 5-minute makeover series for PowerPoint 2010.

Once again, the idea is to rid your presentation of too much text in favor of graphic elements (including converting text to a SmartArt graphic) that will better convey your message and keep your audience focused on key elements -- rather than having to read lots of text while simultaneously trying to concentrate on what you're saying. Pretty tough, if not impossible, to do both. This makeover is designed to help fix that situation, and quickly, without you having to start from scratch or take a lot of time to do so.

Watch the video below, and then get the template used in the makeover.

-- Erik Jensen

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

Today Bruce shows how you can get exact color matches using this neat (and free!) software to pick the perfect color for any slide.

You can download Color Cop for free at http://colorcop.net.

-- Bruce Gabrielle

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Check out this blog post from Betsy Weber. Here she shares some information from one of her favorite screencasters, Paolo Tosolini. Paolo shares some tips on how to make your screencasts stand out from the crowd and also how to make them pop like they’re in 3-D.

And speaking of 3-D, this post talks about how to add the third dimension to shapes in your presentation.

-- Joy Miller, for the PowerPoint blog team

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Bruce Gabrielle is author of Speaking PowerPoint: the new language of business, which shows a 12-step process for creating clearer and more convincing PowerPoint presentations for the boardroom.

It's 2011, and we've seen an explosion in PowerPoint use over the past decade. Not only for large-audience presentations, but increasingly as business documents used to collaborate with teammates and drive company strategy.

But the capabilities of PowerPoint keep rushing ahead of the available training. Although more and more people are using PowerPoint, few of them use it well, or as well as they need to.

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Here's a great post put together by our very own Joy Miller. In it, she talks about Troy Chollar, a Microsoft Most Valuable Professional (MVP) for PowerPoint, and how Troy uses Excel 2010 to track his company's design projects. The post even includes a template that you can download if you want to track your projects the way Troy tracks his.

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Last week, President Obama delivered the annual State of the Union speech. It was widely discussed in the US media and Steve Ballmer also referred to it in a subsequent Microsoft Employee Town Hall. What made the speech so good?

Bruce Gabrielle, author of Speaking PowerPoint, has done a short analysis of the "We Do Big Things" part of the president's speech.

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Co-authoring - the ability to work on a shared document, stored on a server, at the same time as other people work on it - is a new feature of both PowerPoint 2010 and Word 2010. You and your colleagues can work on the same document without intruding on one another’s work or locking each other out.

Microsoft Most Valuable Professional Stephanie Krieger does a fantastic job of explaining the benefits of coauthoring on the MVP Awards Program blog.

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Happy New Year to all you lovers of Images and more! 

My name is Natalie, and I have the fun job of supplying free images, photos, clip art and sounds for you to use in your Office programs. And today I wanted to let you know about a very special video offering, especially for PowerPoint 2010, from one of our partners - Fotolia. Videos are perfect for illustrating your key points, creating transitions, or backgrounds.

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Widescreen displays are popping up everywhere. Increasingly it's the default screen format for new products such as HDTV's, laptops and even handheld game systems. Widescreen plasma screens are becoming very popular in boardrooms as a presentation display. Even the US Military uses it for their briefings . What defines a widescreen is it's shape, usually expressed as a ratio of width to height. Standard televisions and most computer screens use a 4:3 aspect ratio. HDTV's use a 16:9 ratio. And widescreen...