Incorporating  a well-constructed chart within your PowerPoint presentation can be a powerful tool to help deliver your message. In this post, guest blogger Ellen Finkelstein provides useful tips on how to turn data from Excel into an easy-to-understand, professional looking chart in PowerPoint

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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.

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Hello, did you miss us? Hi, and welcome back.  We know it's been a while. We appreciate all your mail, even on the old articles, and while it's way too early to start writing about the next release we hope to roll up some interesting new subject matter in this blog very shortly.  Today, we have this exciting announcement. Yes, themes again We wrote a lot in last year's series of blogs trumpeting the coming of shared themes for Office 2007.  If you missed those, you might want to take...

You wouldn’t wear your workout clothes to a job interview, unless of course you were applying as a personal trainer or professional athlete. When you make PowerPoint slides, you are probably trying to sell a product, make a point, or pass a class. It’s not so different from a job interview - you want to look your best. Well guess what? We want to help you look your best.

When you open the new PowerPoint, you’ll see a start page with your recently opened presentations next to a gallery of new themes. In the Customer Preview, we’ve included eight newly designed themes, and the release version will have many more.

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It's a pleasure to announce the return of a great tool for working with PowerPoint files, Microsoft Producer. Originally created by the Microsoft Windows Media team, and available as a free download, Microsoft Producer allows you to take an existing presentation file, capture and synchronize video and audio narration, add additional media content, and produce a unified set of content ready for viewing in a browser on your corporate intranet or a generally accessible web server. A powerful tool for...

Broadcast Slide Show enables you to share your presentation quickly with anyone, anywhere – all directly from PowerPoint 2010. Just open a presentation in PowerPoint, start a broadcast, and share the unique link PowerPoint provides with your audience. Anyone listening to your presentation over the phone or on a conference call can open the link and see your slide show in their Web browser. Whenever you change slides or start an animation, their view updates automatically. You can learn more about...

Today's post is the first of two parts covering a fairly large and important topic for PowerPoint: applying and customizing themes. We'll be focusing on the variety you can generate using the controls on PowerPoint 2007's Design Tab. The Variety Problem A good place to start is explaining why we have made our themes so customizable. You probably already know the answer: we get lots of customer feedback that we don't provide enough - surprise - variety in our design templates. People don't want their...

Today’s post is a guest post from Alex Simmons, a Program Manager on the OneNote team. OneNote 2010 is included in every edition of Office 2010, so make sure to try it out! Hi everyone, we've built a new feature in OneNote 2010 that allows you to take more meaningful notes while reading in other applications. We call the feature Linked Note Taking, an automatic feature when OneNote is docked to the desktop. For supported applications, like PowerPoint, you never have to worry about remembering the...

A New Old Feature I’m going to make a wild guess here. You’re probably reading the PowerPoint and Office Art blog because you’re looking for ways to make your presentations and other documents look better. But you may not know that PowerPoint has some features that are specifically designed to make you look better! Talking in front of an audience scares most people. One of the reasons PowerPoint is a popular application is that it supports you during your speech. PowerPoint keeps you on track with...

Over the years, PowerPoint has gone through a number of graphic improvements. Our goal is always to provide the best environment for you to visualize and communicate your ideas. At the beginning of this release, we looked at how advancements in motion graphics have transformed visual storytelling in broadcast TV and movies. We knew we wanted to bring the same capabilities to presentations. For PowerPoint 2010, we are making the biggest visual update to Slide Show in nearly a decade. PowerPoint's...