In this update, we complete our seasonal theme collection for PowerPoint 2010. You can quickly and easily format an entire presentation to give it a professional and modern look by applying a theme. A theme is a set of formatting choices that include a set of theme colors, a set of theme fonts (including heading and body text fonts), and a set of theme effects (including lines and fill effects). To complement the Summer theme that we released in the previous update, we're bringing you Autumn, Winter, and Spring.

...

I've been invited to attend a series of free presentation webinars, hosted by Ellen Finkelstein, PowerPoint MVP (Most Valuable Professional), author, and presentation skills trainer. I'm really looking forward to the series, so I thought I'd pass the word along.

The webinar features top industry presenters tackling commonly misunderstood topics about presenting and designing presentations. 

Read on for details about this series.

...

Reflect Yourself OfficeArt's greatly improved graphics engine has a lot of sweet tricks up its sleeve and one our favorites is the reflection effect. This effect gives any object the appearance that it is sitting on a very shiny surface. Reflections are nice looking and also very trendy. Television, billboards, print advertisements and websites are using the effect quite a bit. Designers create reflections in high-end graphics programs like PhotoShop and it takes some serious skill to do so. In the...

One of the best ways to build a professional-looking presentation is to use a consistent color scheme. Making sure various elements on your slide are the same color ties them together and creates visual unity for your content. With the new PowerPoint 2013, we’ve introduced a handy feature called the Eyedropper that makes matching color a cinch. Plus, not only can you match colors within your presentation but between formats, such as a website and your slides.

...

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...

One of our pillars for PowerPoint 2010 has been crafting a multimedia experience that allows users to effectively harness the storytelling power of audio and video content. With improvements in bandwidth, computing power, and media devices, we’re seeing media – particularly video – used in all walks of life to enrich communication. We’ve gotten a lot of feedback on PowerPoint’s video capabilities over the years, and we’re very excited about the features we’re rolling out in 2010 to make this experience...

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

Widescreen (16:9) is the new default aspect ratio in the new PowerPoint. To make your experience with the new dimensions pleasant, we’ve built a brand new set of themes specifically targeting this aspect ratio, and we’ve improved our conversion code so that you can easily make the switch to widescreen from other aspect ratios.

...

It’s exciting times for us here on the PowerPoint Engineering Team! Whiteboard brainstorms that began three years ago are now real live features, which are fully functional and ready for a test drive in the PowerPoint 2010 Beta !  As we pass this milestone, I thought it’d be fun to share the inside scoop as to how one of our features, Video Triggers , came to be… Video Triggers is a feature with which one can mark locations in a video (i.e. set bookmarks), and then trigger animation sequences...

Hey everyone, my name is Allen Huang, and I’m one of the Program Managers that works on multimedia in PowerPoint. Although we’re busy working on the next version of PowerPoint, I wanted to take some time to share with you a neat trick I’ve learned in PowerPoint 2007. It also works in older versions of PowerPoint, but I’m going to focus on showing how it works in 2007. PowerPoint users are often asking how to get their YouTube or MSN SoapBox videos into PowerPoint. It takes a little bit of work to...