With all of the attention on the new multimedia, transition, and animations, you might be forgiven for thinking that all we care about is fancy graphics. Not at all – nearly every PowerPoint presentation contains some amount of text, and in fact, we spend a lot of time making sure that it’s easy to add text to your presentations and that your text looks great. In that, we are aided by a large number of groups across Office. One of those groups is the Natural Language Team , who posted about improvements...

As one of the newest program managers on the PowerPoint team (and a recovering history major), I’m always fascinated to hear the stories behind features I now can’t imagine living without. And as one of the engineers responsible for Accessibility in PowerPoint, I care a tremendous amount about the accessibility of the software we build. So you can imagine how happy I was to see these two interests collide in one of the latest posts to the Office Engineering Blog —a backstage peek at the new Document...

My last post had a screen shot of a nice slide in it. In the text of my post I explained how create that slide, but the lack of clear, visual step by step instructions may have obscured just how easy it is to create slides like that in PowerPoint 2007. In this post we'll explain a little more about layouts and give you the step by step with screen shots this time. Custom & Built-In Layouts PowerPoint has a new feature called Custom Layouts. This feature lets you define the types of slides you...

Last week the Microsoft Silicon Valley Campus was fortunate to host Presentation Zen blogger and author Garr Reynolds.   Garr presented on the origins of the Presentation Zen philosophy and style; how to bring Zen simplicity and clarity to your communications. The Presentation Zen style is a very accessible and effective set of guidance and references for making your communications engaging and effective. Amazingly popular just five months after its publication, the book Presentation Zen has...

Hello, did you miss us? Hi, and welcome back.  We know it's been a while. We appreciate all your mail, even on the old articles, and while it's way too early to start writing about the next release we hope to roll up some interesting new subject matter in this blog very shortly.  Today, we have this exciting announcement. Yes, themes again We wrote a lot in last year's series of blogs trumpeting the coming of shared themes for Office 2007.  If you missed those, you might want to take...

We learn best by examples.  And the better the example, the better the results. That’s why its a pleasure to point you to a new group of PowerPoint examples that are stunning, inventive, evocative… simply beautiful.  Nice enough if it stops there, but each and every one of these examples includes very detailed instructions on how you can reconstruct the design, and learn how to apply the technique to your own work. Animation for graphics and text, static text effects,  photographic...

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...

This is the second in a two part post on how Office Themes can generate effectively limitless variations. The first part appeared last week. Office Themes work across the major applications in Office. Everything in this post can also be done in Word, Excel and Outlook email messages as well. In PowerPoint the Design Tab is the user interface that provides control over all of this theme variation. In Word and Excel you'll find the Themes group on the Page Layout Tab. Today we'll focus on changing...

GetConnected hosts Mike Agerbo and AJ Vickery take a look at some of the cool things you can do with PowerPoint 2010.

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Like Microsoft Word , PowerPoint has made a significant investment in document co-authoring for the Office 2010 release. What is co-authoring? This is the capability for multiple users to open the same presentation file and to simultaneously edit and save changes to that file. Co-authoring solves a lot of problems with the current models of collaboration, where multiple versions of files are stored at multiple locations, not to mention the proliferation of presentations circulating via e-mail amongst...