Next up in our series of posts by PowerPoint's summer interns is Software Development Engineer Mike Rodgers. Hi there, I’m Mike Rodgers, and I’m mid-way through my twelve-week internship as a Software Development Engineer (or Dev for short) with the PowerPoint team. I grew up in Boulder, Colorado, and I’ve spent the last four years out in California, studying Computer Science at Stanford University. I’m enrolled in a “Co-terminal” program, meaning that I’ll...

Next up in our series of posts by PowerPoint's summer interns is Software Development Engineer Trevor Florence. Hi! My name is Trevor Florence and I’m a Software Developer Engineer intern here in PowerPoint. I’m from a smallish town near Ventura California and have spent the last several years living in Utah, Chile, Seattle, and now back in California. I’m working on my Master’s in Computer Science at Brigham Young University and have a little more than a year to go. At this...

Next up in our series of posts by PowerPoint's summer interns is Software Design Engineer Jesse Harvey.   Hello All, My name is Jesse Harvey and I am in my seventh week as a Software Design Engineer in Test (SDET) intern with the PowerPoint team. I was born and raised in a small town in Western New York.  I am a 5 th year student at Rochester Institute of Technology ( RIT ) in NY working on the Computer Engineering dual degree (BS & MS) program. RIT is a very career oriented school...

First in our series of posts by PowerPoint's summer interns is Program Manager Nirav Sanghani. Hi, I’m Nirav Sanghani, a Program Manager intern on PowerPoint for the summer. I can’t talk about exactly what I’m doing at PowerPoint (top secret!) but I’d like to talk a bit about my background, what an intern can expect in this type of internship, and what I like most about Microsoft. I just finished my sophomore year at the University of Pennsylvania way over in Philadelphia. After having me interview...

  Trevor Florence, Nirav Sanghani, Mike Rodgers, Jesse Harvey, Luiz Franca Pereira Filho The next few posts will introduce you to a select group of individuals, with a special relationship with PowerPoint.  Each year, the PowerPoint program management, test and development groups hire a few interns for the summer. This is a fairly common practice at Microsoft, part of a larger recruiting and hiring effort, which allows college students the opportunity to work for a few months contributing...

    If you’re an Office 2007 user you should just go download SP2, install it and enjoy.  However, if you want to understand the goodness that comes with SP2, read on… OK, so what’s a “Service Pack?” Once a product makes it out into “the wild,” which is one way of referring to the real world of users, we start hearing about work we could have done better. We actively look for reports, official and unofficial, of problems with the product.  We’re looking for bugs and design issues...

Have you seen this unexpected security dialog pop up when you run slide show? What is this thing anyway, and how can I prevent it from showing up? Let’s face it, we live in a security conscious environment these days.  One general trend in the hacker community is to rely upon “social engineering” to foist viruses, mal-ware, etc. onto your computer.  Social engineering basically means that the evil doers out there somehow convince you to open a Microsoft® Office document which could contain...

One of the most powerful features of PowerPoint is the ability to click a button and morph your presentation in to a completely different animal.  Designers have the ability to define nearly every aspect of how your content is arranged, colored, and rendered. For Office 2007, we released a set of themes which exposes the fundamental capabilities of the themes engine. Just click on the design tab, and explore the gallery.  Each theme automatically inherits a multidimensional matrix of variations...

This is the third in a series of quick video tips for business managers using PowerPoint by guest blogger Bruce Gabrielle, author of Speaking PowerPoint. Bruce's second tip showed how to quickly create custom silhouettes using free pictures, and his first was about turning clip art into custom icons. 

You've got a great picture for a slide, but your slide title can't be seen against its cluttered background. Here's a great trick for quieting noisy backgrounds using shapes and gradients so your slide title stands out.

-- Bruce Gabrielle

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Often when it's time to present to your class, other people are slated to present before and after you do. With so many presentations to pay attention to, your audience might be tempted to snooze when you want them to watch.

Here's a fix--keep your audience engaged by making over your presentation in under 5 minutes, using PowerPoint. Use video and images instead of blocks of text to make your message visually interesting. The video below, part of the 5-minute makeover series, shows you how. And don't forget to download the free template while you're at it.

If you’re a student or involved in education, check out the Office in Education blog for more news and tips.

-- Erik Jensen

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