PowerPoint on the Web: Editing

Now that you’ve learned about PowerPoint Web App’s Reading View – designed for quickly reading presentations that have been published on the web -- we’d like to introduce you to Edit View. Edit View is, unsurprisingly, the place where you go to make changes to your presentation on the web.

To begin with, we designed this view to parallel our desktop app’s Normal View. On the web, you’ll find the familiar ribbon, thumbnail pane, and notes pane. Take a look at the desktop app and the web app side-by-side:

Fast, Simple and Trustworthy

As we’ve discussed in previous posts, the PowerPoint Web App has been designed as a companion to the PowerPoint desktop application. The desktop app is great for creating beautiful presentations (see some examples here), and for giving presentations that take advantage of the full power of the local machine. The web app is focused on giving you access to your presentations wherever you are, quickly and easily.

Looking beyond viewing and giving presentations, we knew that people would want to be able to make changes to their presentations from anywhere. Our primary goal is to provide you with a fast and streamlined editing experience, optimized for simple changes on the run. Most importantly, however, we made sure that no matter what changes you make, the fidelity of your document will be preserved.

The latter point is by far the most critical one. The PowerPoint desktop app has been in development for over 20 years. It supports hundreds of features. In the first version of the web app, we knew that we would not be able to support all of them. So we focused on building a foundation for the editing experience that would ensure that even if the web app doesn’t support direct editing of a particular feature, the feature would be perfectly preserved in the document for later editing in the desktop app.

For example, let’s say that you are editing a title that has a 3D rotation and a reflection applied to it. PowerPoint Web App will let you change the text and font, as well as apply other basic formatting. The 3D rotation and reflection will not be stripped off the text simply because the web app doesn’t support editing those properties. They will be maintained and automatically merged with the changes you’ve made to the text.

This attention to the tiny details of document fidelity mean that you can confidently store and edit your presentations on the web, secure in the knowledge that all parts of the presentation will be intact the next time you open it on the PowerPoint desktop app.

Streamlined editing on the web

Of course, you want to know what you’ll be able to edit. We focused on the most important and common editing activities.

We began with the most basic activities: adding, re-ordering and deleting slides. When you add a new slide, all of the layouts in the presentation are available for you to choose from, just as they are in the desktop app. So if you’re working with a presentation created from a corporate template or one downloaded from Office Online, you’ll be able to use the custom layouts from the template.

Next, we focused on text editing. You can make most common changes to text in placeholders – font, size, and color, to name a few. As described above, you’ll notice that when you make changes to text that has advanced effects applied (reflections, shadows, etc.), those effects are maintained with full fidelity and are automatically reapplied to the edited text.

Many PowerPoint presentations are full of pictures, so we made sure that you can not only insert and delete pictures, but you can also easily apply the same Quick Styles found in the desktop app.

Of course, if you have a picture perfectly formatted, but you find that you need to you swap in a new picture, you can use Change Picture and keep all of your original formatting.

Office 2007 introduced SmartArt graphics – a new type of graphic that changes automatically based on the content. The ability to create and edit SmartArt graphics in the web app was a natural and important addition. Watch for a future post with many more details!

Navigating to and from Edit View

You can go directly into Edit View (click Edit on Skydrive or SharePoint) or switch over from Reading View. If you are in Reading View, the toolbar across the top of the view has an entry point, shown below.

Notice that when Edit View opens, you’re still on the same slide you were just reading!

If you want to see how your slides will look animated, you can switch back into Reading View or check out your progress in Slide Show from the View Tab.

Give us your thoughts!

This is only the beginning. We will continue to improve the web editing experience. As to what’s next? We’d love to hear your opinion! What’s the most common thing that you want to do on the web? Please leave comments or submit feedback as you use the technical preview!

November 11, 2009