In today’s world, you often need to communicate with people in different locations who can’t get together in the same room. When you’re presenting, you want everyone to see your slide show at the same time -- whether they’re sitting next to you or joining on the phone from 10,000 miles away. PowerPoint 2010 makes it easy to present on the fly to anyone, anywhere. Just send a link, and in one click everyone you invite will be watching a synchronized view of your slide show in their browser. You’ll...

Keeping secrets It’s one of the hardest things about working on great products. A team of talented, proud engineers must stay mum about what’s underway until very late in the development cycle. But then finally we get to show you that we are, indeed, listening. No surprise that this aspect of our jobs should show up in the PowerPoint team’s blog. But this time I get to call back to a blog entry I made last year and update you on a few things. Over a year ago, in response to a common user question...

  Over the past few months, we have shared our excitement about the new features of PowerPoint 2010 , such as Collaboration, Video Editing, Photo Effects, Background Removal, Presentation Broadcast, Slide Show Enhancements, Interface Customization, New Transitions, Slide Editing Improvements, and the brand new PowerPoint Web App available on SharePoint 2010, SkyDrive, and Hotmail.  Our team is proud to announce that PowerPoint and the rest of Office 2010 are available in retail stores and...

Special guest post today from Jason Schneekloth, Program Manager for PowerPoint Tables PowerPoint Tables have been given a major revision with this release of Office. We have put a great deal of work into Tables this release in order to combat many of the pain points users had in the past when working with PowerPoint Tables. To show off how things have changed for the better and the new features of PowerPoint Tables, let’s take a look at the updated ‘Insert Table’ In the above image we see that 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...

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...

It's unavoidable. When people find out we work on PowerPoint, we get questions. Sometimes they're new, but many are repeaters. We take all questions seriously, especially the repeaters, as those sponsor changes we need to make to the product. Our goal is to eliminate the necessity of the question in the first place by better design. To be clear, many of the questions we get are answered in the PowerPoint help, or in online support. But again, the fact that people don't find these answers means we...

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...

…were created entirely in PowerPoint 2010. Many of you have been wondering how this is possible; it must be some kind of joke. Does PowerPoint make video? Allow me to formally introduce our new “Create a Video” feature. With just a couple clicks, anyone can make a video of his or her presentation which is easy to distribute, share, or archive. Check out this “marketing” video that some of our engineers created and uploaded to YouTube:    Whether for marketing your product, teaching a lecture...

Today, we are announcing the availability of the PowerPoint 2010 Beta.  It is a public download that anyone can try for free. What can you do with PowerPoint 2010? Collaborate more effectively with Co-Authoring Bring your ideas to life with Video Editing , Transitions & Animations , Picture Editing, and SmartArt Author your presentations in less time using the new Animation Painter , Animation Ribbon , Transition Ribbon , and Smart Guides Reach your audience with Broadcast Slide Show Work...