The New PowerPoint

Two and a half years have passed since we released the 2010 version of PowerPoint.  Since then, we’ve listened to your comments and feedback and narrowed down a set of scenarios that are most important to you, and we’ve evolved and developed new features that are designed to save you time and improve your authoring and presentation experiences.

We can’t wait to tell you about what we did, how we did it, and why we think will make your life better.  We know that when you sit down to create a presentation, you probably aren’t thinking, “Wow, what new features should I use today?”  You are thinking, “Get out of my way, I need to finish these slides before my next meeting!”  So we strive to build tools that do just that – we want to get out of your way so that you focus on getting your job done.

Right when you start PowerPoint, it presents you with a set of professional designs that will make your slides look amazing with just a few simple clicks:

When you draw diagrams, improved Smart Guides pop in to help you align shapes, and they disappear the moment you are done.  When you present, the newly designed Presenter View kicks in automatically so that you don’t have to go figure out projector settings.  When you want to share your slides, you can send a link right from within PowerPoint, and you can even set permissions so that your team doesn’t even have to sign in to view or edit them, if you wish.

Before we tell you about anything else, you should go check out the free Office 2013 Customer Preview.  That way you can experience PowerPoint’s features first-hand as you read along.  Stay tuned here for more!

-Christopher Maloney
Program Manager, PowerPoint