When all your slides look alike, your entire message can be blurred. At the end of your presentation, you want your audience to remember your main points most, and if they remember some of the details, that's a plus. By making key slides distinctive, you can help people follow and retain the content in your presentation.  PowerPoint MVP Ellen Finkelstein shares her PowerPoint layout tips.

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Back in the day, clear and concise text was the key to a good presentation. But the game has changed. People expect your slides to dance. Well, not really dance, but they certainly expect some animation here and there. That's why we've added two new lessons on PowerPoint animations to our PowerPoint skills builder--a free video training series. 

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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...

We break from our Winter break with a guest post from Chris Becker. Chris is one of our team's developers who wanted to share some observations on using 3D in PowerPoint 2007. The result is a quick set of steps you can walk through and explore the power of the new text and graphics engines. -RB Hi, I’m Chris from CoolBeans fame! 3D is one of the great new features of PowerPoint 2007, so I wanted to highlight what some of the new features are and how they can be used. For starters, how do you get...

PowerPoint 2010 has new features that can help bring your stories to life and make your messages more compelling. We’ve even included sample templates to give you ideas, including some tips from Duarte Design. We approached Nancy Duarte after she gave a talk at our campus with the idea of creating a cinematic presentation, especially for you. Working with her team was such a treat, and it was great to see how they took advantage of the capabilities of PowerPoint 2010 to create an amazingly effective...

Creating a good presentation usually involves a number of steps: organizing your thoughts, developing a story, adding the content to your slides, and then taking some time to adjust the design so that it is aesthetically pleasing and appropriate for the setting. Adding animations is often a nice finishing touch. Once you apply an animation to an object, there are a variety of settings and adjustments to help you fine-tune for a more polished effect. It’s quite common to then apply that same animation...

Today, the Office Web Apps are available on Windows Live. The initial release is available to Windows Live customers in the USA, Canada, Great Britain and Ireland with support for English, Spanish (USA) and French (Canada). More languages and locales will be added over the coming months. This release includes PowerPoint, Word, Excel and OneNote. Read the Windows Live Announcement to see what it’s all about. You can also learn more about the PowerPoint Web App here . Go ahead, try them out and...

Many of you spend a lot of time working in PowerPoint. It’s become the top visual communications tool in business and is used to shape perception every day. But PowerPoint is only the instrument, you’re the master musician. Any great musician can tell you that it takes practice, practice, practice to master an instrument. When Microsoft approached us to create an instructional template for PowerPoint 2010, we were thrilled. To actually be in PowerPoint, an application that we have a long history...

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.

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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...