Making Your Words Shine in PowerPoint 2010

With all of the attention on the new multimedia, transition, and animations, you might be forgiven for thinking that all we care about is fancy graphics. Not at all – nearly every PowerPoint presentation contains some amount of text, and in fact, we spend a lot of time making sure that it’s easy to add text to your presentations and that your text looks great.

In that, we are aided by a large number of groups across Office. One of those groups is the Natural Language Team, who posted about improvements to the core text engine leveraged by PowerPoint 2010, including new spell-checkers and thesauri – in particular, a new French contextual spell-checker – and a new “inflectional morphology” feature when doing look-ups. See, now you have to go and check out their blog, just to find out what inflectional morphology is. It’s cool, trust me.

The Global Experience team in Office is responsible for many features to help people work in use Office in their own languages or to be productive even when working in other languages. For this release, they introduced a new Mini Translator to Word, OneNote, Outlook, PowerPoint. This amazing feature lets you select some text for an instant translation to the language of your choice, or hover over a single word for a bilingual definition. It’s perfect for when someone sends you a presentation in a language you either don’t know, or are not completely fluent in – you see a word or phrase you’re not familiar with, and one-click later, you have the definition.  The team’s blog has a lot more information on this and other great language features, so be sure to check it out.

A Bilingual (English-to-Spanish) instant definition in the Mini Translator

Another group that contributes significantly to text in PowerPoint is the RichEdit team, who have worked hard to add math editing and display support to PowerPoint 2010. Murray Sargent from the RichEdit team has posted about the new Math features in Office 2010. Here’s a teaser of a slide I created in about 30 seconds, containing a couple of perfectly laid-out equations (hint: I did cheat a little because these particular equations are built-in and can be inserted with a single click, but the equation input is flexible enough to create almost any equation you can imagine).

A pair of sample equations in PowerPoint

PowerPoint also benefits from the Live Preview Paste feature that Mirko of the User Experience team described on the Office 2010 blog.

Aside from all of the work done by our partner teams, the PowerPoint Text team has the final responsibility for how users interact with text. One of our tenets is that you should find that working with text just works the way you expect it to work. To that end, we also a made a number of small improvements to the way PowerPoint 2010 handles text, particularly when copying and pasting text, using the Format Painter, and working with indented (bulleted) text.

Oh, and for professional slide and template designers, we snuck in a quick implementation of =lorem(), which, like the existing =rand(), will insert up to three paragraphs of text from the famous lorem ipsum text, helping you to visualize how your slides will look, using slightly more varied text than repeated strings of The Quick Brown Fox….

And of course, when your presentation is projected on-screen, the text will look fantastic, just like everything else. As described in Jason and Chris’s post, the PowerPoint Slide Show team has built a new 3D-accelerated rendering engine, which makes everything, even text, look smooth and beautiful.

So remember, while you’re downloading the beta, “Bullets don’t kill presentations, people overusing bullets kill presentations."

Happy typing!