Five math whizzes from the same city go to Harvard to study business and only one becomes a CEO of his own company. You want to use visuals in your PowerPoint presentation to help tell their story to budding entrepreneurs at an upcoming event.

In this short video, Bruce Gabrielle shows you how to use the Transitions and Artistic Effects features in PowerPoint to make parts of an image fade into the background and another part come into focus.  

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With so much new in this release of Office, its easy to overlook some of the less-earth-shattering-yet-still-cool-goodness we've baked in for you. This is a series of short posts highlighting a few of these unsung heroes, things to try out in the beta releases or later when you have the released product. - Richard Bretschneider This first "quick" feature is doubly interesting; besides the fact you may have missed it in PowerPoint 2007, you may have missed it in PowerPoint 2003! It's setting a default...

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...

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

Tables with rounded corners are friendlier, more contemporary, more web 2.0. But you can't create them automatically. Here's how you can achieve this effect using a handful of workarounds that include shapes, gradient colors, and background fills.

-- Bruce Gabrielle

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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...

Last week we announced the release of the new Office Web Apps. Today, we’re excited to talk a bit more in depth about the new things available in PowerPoint Web App. We’ve packed a ton of new features into this release all oriented around helping you be more productive. We wanted to make it super-easy to build great presentations quickly and effortlessly on the Web and with the new PowerPoint Web App you can.

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You want to meet in real time to create or refine a PowerPoint presentation, but often the people with whom you need to meet cannot be at the same place at the same time. With the growing usage of messaging and audio/video conferencing software, people are collaborating from multiple locations. Whether you’re a student who needs to finish a class project with your peers, a small business owner who wants to share a presentation with clients, or a family member sharing vacation photos in a slide...

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...

I'm thrilled to announce a special new collection of 34 PowerPoint 2010 video templates! These templates are available now as free downloads on Office.com.

Use them as-is, or step through the procedures (that appear in each template's Notes pane) to learn how to reproduce the look of each template, thereby enhancing your PowerPoint skills.

To view an example of one of the video templates ('Relax Lake'), play the video below:

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  Technical Preview Program PowerPoint fans and community, we’re excited to announce that the PowerPoint team will be taking applications to participate in the Office 2010 Technical Preview program. We will be sending out a limited number of invitations to download and install the Office 2010 Technical Preview in early July. For you, this is a first opportunity to experience the new, exciting features that we’ve been working on in PowerPoint. For us, this is an opportunity to get valuable feedback...