Along with the news about our new themes , you may have noticed that the Microsoft Office 2010 Engineering blog also announced the ability to insert Clip Art in the PowerPoint Web App. Other updates: Windows SkyDrive gets better with Office Web Apps Office Web Apps: Why they're the clearer connection High quality images and more Many of you may be wondering why you should be excited by this. Perhaps the first thing that comes to mind when you hear “Clip Art” is this friendly little illustration...

Our friends over on the Microsoft Office 2010 Engineering blog recently announced some great new features in the Excel, Word, and PowerPoint Web Apps. Among the new goodies are some brand new themes that you’ll find in the Select Theme dialog when you create a new presentation on SkyDrive . We’ve also re-organized the gallery in a way that we believe will better suit your needs: On and off the Web For those of you using PowerPoint 2010 installed on your computer, we bring the latest and greatest...

If you're looking for an alternative to snail mailing a traditional holiday card this year, why not send this pre-made, animated, musically-enhanced E-card instead?

Sandra Johnson, a Microsoft Most Valuable Professional (MVP) for PowerPoint, created the card using PowerPoint 2010. And she's made it easy for you to personalize it with your own message.

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Now that you’ve learned about PowerPoint Web App’s Reading View – designed for quickly reading presentations that have been published on the web -- we’d like to introduce you to Edit View . Edit View is, unsurprisingly, the place where you go to make changes to your presentation on the web. To begin with, we designed this view to parallel our desktop app’s Normal View. On the web, you’ll find the familiar ribbon, thumbnail pane, and notes pane. Take a look at the desktop app and the web app side...

Many of you spend a lot of time working in PowerPoint. It’s become the top visual communications tool in business and is used to shape perception every day. But PowerPoint is only the instrument, you’re the master musician. Any great musician can tell you that it takes practice, practice, practice to master an instrument. When Microsoft approached us to create an instructional template for PowerPoint 2010, we were thrilled. To actually be in PowerPoint, an application that we have a long history...

Welcome to the 21st century. Computers are omnipresent. The extent of your audience is no longer constrained to a single conference room or the space just over your left shoulder. Whether you are sharing the videos from your recent trip with your family hundreds of miles away or presenting a media-rich business plan to potential customers on the other side of the globe, your slides need to work on computers other than the one right in front of you. It’s simple, right? Just attach the presentation...

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...

Yesterday I installed the latest internal build of Office 2007 and magically many of OfficeArt's effects looked better than ever. The reason: we recently checked in all of the effect settings that will be in the final product. One of the effects that got a tremendous upgrade in this latest build is Picture Recoloring. There is a big improvement over what's in Beta2. Psst: This post is just about picture recolor but that 3D frame effect is also one of our new "settings" for the Picture Quick Style...

Party Tricks. There's a category of software functionality that, despite the best intention of the designers and developers, somehow never seems to make it into general use.  Sometimes these are essential features, and that's a really bad thing because a customer's failure to find an essential feature means the developers wasted their efforts.  We don't blame the customer, we blame ourselves and try to fix things down the road.  Luckily we're pretty good about usability testing and...

I thought it might make some sense to introduce some of the new things that we’re doing with picture handling in Office2007. Given that Pictures are found in over 57% of all office documents, it’s our single biggest graphic type and deserves some special attention. One of the best features for managing pictures in Office2003 is the feature that you never knew about; Compress Pictures . We did such a good job of hiding this in a remote part of the obscure Picture Toolbar , that we all but assured...