(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...

PowerPoint has a lot of great pre-set shapes, but sometimes what you really need is a tailor-made shape for your presentation. If you’re looking to go beyond the Freeform Tool and create more complex custom shapes, there's a feature called Combine Shapes in PowerPoint 2010 that helps you do just that!  It uses the principles of Boolean Geometry, to help you create new shapes by combining multiple shapes in one of four ways: Union, Combine, Subtract, or Intersect.

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Have you ever gotten lost in a giant presentation? You know the feeling. The slide titles and numbers start blurring together, and navigating through the presentation becomes impossible. You simply lose track of where you are! There must be a better way to keep slides organized! In PowerPoint 2010, you can use the new Sections feature to organize your slides, much like you would use folders to organize your files. You can use named sections to keep track of groups of slides, or you can assign sections...

On Friday, April 16, 2010, we shipped the final build of PowerPoint 2010 to manufacturing. We also shipped SharePoint 2010, with support for the new PowerPoint Web App. Read more about the RTM milestone in this post from Office Corporate Vice President Takeshi Numoto , and about the SharePoint release from SharePoint Server Vice President, Jeff Teper Top 10 benefits of PowerPoint 2010: 1 Bring more energy and visual impact to your presentations. Save time and money by applying sophisticated photo...

Have you ever been on the phone with someone and suddenly wished you could just show them what you mean? You can! With PowerPoint Broadcast Slide Show and a few clicks, you can send your slides to your customer or partner and walk them through your message.

In this excerpt from the Office Show, Doug Thomas shows you how the new PowerPoint 2010 feature Broadcast Slide Show allows you to send your live presentation across the web to many different devices.

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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.

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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.

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Our friends over on the Microsoft Office 2010 Engineering blog recently announced some great new features in the Excel, Word, and PowerPoint Web Apps. Among the new goodies are some brand new themes that you’ll find in the Select Theme dialog when you create a new presentation on SkyDrive . We’ve also re-organized the gallery in a way that we believe will better suit your needs: On and off the Web For those of you using PowerPoint 2010 installed on your computer, we bring the latest and greatest...

Sure, there are lots of great new things about PowerPoint 2010, but for me it's all about the power of video. In the video below, I'll show you how PowerPoint 2010 makes it easier than ever to add and edit video.

Nothing grabs an audience like video and now you can edit right in PowerPoint. I'll walk you through some quick and easy steps and show you how to:

• Insert your video into a slide.
• Trim your video right in your presentation.
• Reduce your video file size for email delivery.

Are you ready to test your Hollywood skills?

Check out the video below and then try your hand at creating a video presentation in PowerPoint. Join us on Facebook and let us know how it's going.

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Our early new year's resolution? To help you find the great templates (including 2011 calendar templates) that we have, and to let you know that they're free. As in "no cost to you". This isn't a limited-time offer. They've always been free, and will continue to be.

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