Announcing PowerPoint 2010 Beta Availability

Great news, I'm downloading Office 2010 Professional Plus Beta and the Project 2010 Beta right now so I can test them out.

Does PP 2010 support multi-drawing function.

Win 7 supports multi-touch. Will it be possible to draw semulteniously upon PP slide for 2-3 users. For example on Tablet PC (like HP TouchSmart tx2). Sorry for question. I have no access to our Touchsmart at the moment.

PPT 2010 does not support multi-drawing, but it's something we'll take a look at in the future. PowerPoint 2010 (and even previous versions of PowerPoint) will support basic multi-touch functionality such as seek forward/backward gestures and single and dual-finger panning. Thanks for your question and please keep the feedback coming! Allen Huang PowerPoint Program Manager

Thank you for your information.

I thought there was going to be a timeline function>!

Hi I couldn't find any user forums for Power Point 2010 beta so far on the net. I do work with the product since a couple of days. My Problem: Many of my old presentations created with Power Point 2003 can not be presented. When presenting (on screen presentation) and arriving at some of the slides a black screen is all I can see. Could not find out a reason as these specific slides do not have any special content. Out of about 25 slides maybe 5 do show that specific phenomena. In all the other modi (normal working modus) Power Point can handle everything perfectly. Thanks for any advice.

Hi Skillpartners,

We're not aware of a normal content or construction that would cause slides created with PowerPoint 2003 to be black when opened in PowerPoint 2010. We'd very much like to arrange to get an example of this to review. Please reply if that's something we could pursue. In addition, you can use the Microsoft Public Newsgroups to discuss PowerPoint 2010, this site is monitored by a number of Microsoft employees and MVP representatives: www.microsoft.com/.../default.aspx -Ric Bretschneider

Animated GIFs won't play in it, even the ones from office online they just show a still image on the slide show

Does PPT10 return to the tear-off floating menus that PPT03 used, and which could be populated with infinite single-click command shortcuts? The PPT07 "ribbon" was a great step backwards and a productivity killer. Tell me these are a feature again, please!

What is the laser pointer feature?

The Laser Pointer feature is new for PowerPoint 2010. During a slide show you can use your mouse to move a laser dot around on your screen. Just hold down the CTRL button and then press your primary mouse button to make the dot appear. This lets you point out things to your audience in the same way you would with an actual laser pointer. We'll cover the feature and some of its unexpected benefits in a future post.

Thanks for asking,

-Ric Bretschneider

I have Office 2010 Professional Plus loaded on two computers, one running Vista, the other Windows 7. Everything works beautifully except for PowerPoint on the computer running Windows 7. Is there a compatibility issue? Any recommendations? If this is the wrong place to seek help, where should I turn.

I have a question and I know this sounds really stupid,...but there HAS to be something that I'm missing here. When I have an object or shape (any kind) and I want to add an effect or animation to it,...(from the top menu bar) when the options drop down,..they block my shapes so that I can't even see how each effect looks with it. This seems crazy to me! This means I have to stop, go back, try and move the object off of the viewing area so that I can actually see it when selecting effects. Isn't there a way to either tear off the menu tabs at the top or at least make it so that they use logic when dropping down and shift according to the shape's placement on the canvas? Does this make any sense or is there something really obvious that I'm missing here?

How do you do a Word Count in Powerpoint?

@Todd

One way to browse the gallery without covering the slide is to use the up/down scrolling buttons on the right of the gallery instead of clicking the drop-down button. Hopefully this helps. @Kevin

Click on the "File" button and then look on the right side of the screen. You'll see a bunch of information, and at the bottom a link that says "Show All Properties" which, if clicked, will reveal the word count. Keep in mind that this includes the text contained in shapes and Smart Art, words in the notes pane of each slide, as well as text in off-slide content.