Smart Guides make it easy to design presentations that look professional. Believe it or not, they help you align shapes without any clicks. Read how.

...

Today's post about fitting pictures into PowerPoint slides is by author Bruce Gabrielle.

Ever have this problem? You have a great picture for your PowerPoint slide, but it fits awkwardly on the page, leaving a big gap of white space. This looks really amateurish.

What do you do? Keep reading....

...

Over on Microsoft Corporate Citizenship blog, I wrote up some tips when you're planning your presentation. It summarizes a recent talk I gave for non-profits. Luckily, the same points apply if you work at a for-profit company. It includes a walk-through of Presenter View (pictured below).

...

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

(This post, originally published in 2010, announced the availability of the PowerPoint 2010 Viewer. This post remains incredibly popular because so people find the Viewer to be a useful tool. We're republishing it so readers of our blog can find and use it, too.) I’m excited to announce that our new PowerPoint Viewer is now available here for free download . By installing the PowerPoint Viewer, you can open and watch PowerPoint presentations in all formats, no matter what computer you’re...

Welcome to Office Tip Classics -- a series of one-minute videos where you'll get to see clips of film classics and learn a tip about Office 2010. In this episode, school tough-guy Marty has a hard time keeping his cool after losing the class presentation contest. His teacher tries to cheer him up, explaining how to add a video to his PowerPoint presentation. Maybe he won't be such a sore loser next time.

...

In this week’s webinar, we'll show you some nuggets for making better PowerPoint presentations. You can join Office webinars at 9:15 am Pacific on Tuesdays. Go to http://aka.ms/offweb for complete information.

What you will learn at Tuesday’s webinar:

• How PowerPoint is like your resume
• Using the Notes section In PowerPoint
• Using Presenter’s View in...

...

How do you crop the background out of photos, leaving behind an irregular shape like a coffee cup, stop sign or even a human being? Here's one way, using the drawing tools in PowerPoint.  Guest blogger Bruce Gabrielle shows you how.

...

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.  

...

In PowerPoint 2010, you can remove a background from a picture to accent or highlight the subject of the picture or to remove distracting detail. This post shows you how to do that by using Remove Background button, cropping an image, and more.

...