PowerPoint 2010 has a lot of improvements, but there are two that I think are absolutely  game-changing features: Video embedding and PowerPoint broadcasting. These are the kinds of "if only" features that make you slap your forehead and go, "Dang, if only I'd had that X years ago." Like, if I'd only had this laptop in college. And Red Bull. Oh yeah, and the Internet.  But I digress.

Case in point:  I do some volunteering with a non-profit journalism organization, the Asian American Journalists Association. Last year I joined a committee to produce a  high-technology training event in Chicago for journalists from the ethnic press. Now, of our committee members, two of us live in Seattle, two in Chicago, one in California. Nobody uses the same computers or software, and we had documents to share, timelines to go over, deadlines to meet and proposals to make. The night before a crucial presentation....

PowerPivot for Excel is an Excel 2010 add-in that allows users to pull data from multiple sources, mash them up, and then build reports using regular pivot tables. You can even share these reports with others in Microsoft SharePoint (via PowerPivot for SharePoint). In this demo from Channel 9, Julie Strauss, Program Manager for Microsoft SQL Server Analysis Services, shows just how easy it is to get a better view into your data. Watch for the part where she sorts 100 million rows of data instantly. 100 million rows. Not a typo. You can download the PowerPivot add-in for free at the Microsoft Download Center. More info at powerpivot.com.

In this video, Office.com writer Ron Owens unveils his favorite new features in Word 2010 and some tips for making the most of them. Learn how to customize your workspace, simplify your printing experience, co-author documents, and use the Navigation Pane and paste preview. For more Office 2010 videos, check out The Office Blog on Channel 9.

Our friends at Channel 9 have produced a great series of demo videos about the new features of Office 2010. In this Access 2010 demo, you'll find out how to make the most of your information, even if you aren’t a database expert. Ryan McMinn, lead program manager for Microsoft Access, explains new features like community templates, and shows how you can track, report, and share more easily. For more of Channel 9's Office 2010 videos check out The Office Blog on Channel 9. For more about what's new in Access, check out the Getting Started with Access page on Office.com.

PowerPoint is one of the most effective business tools ever invented, but we all know PowerPoint presentations can go horribly wrong.  That's why we created this episode of "The Office Show," to help you use the great design capabilities of PowerPoint, and thus avoid those dreaded presentation sleepfests.

And we know that sometimes you've got no time to produce a professional slide deck, while with other projects you want to spend a lot of time to get it right. The Office Show has some tips for both situations.

Microsoft design guru March Rogers starts the show with  the basic principles of design. Good design is absolutely crucial to communicating well with any audience, and thinking about these principles can really help you make your points more effective. Office.com's Doug Thomas, Mr. Office Casual, demonstrates some new PowerPoint features, like background removal and combine shapes - that help put those principles into action. And to inspire you further, we've created a 150-page flipbook animation built entirely in PowerPoint.

And we've got what we call our Quick and Dirty Trick: which is pretty simple. If you don't have time to start from scratch, we've got a huge number of professionally designed templates that get you a great head start. Most of you know about templates already, but you may not know that we've worked with professionals to create things like 3D text effects and animations, that you can download and use for free. The 3D text effect template on the show was created by PowerPoint MVP Julie Terberg. There are many more example slide effects templates on Office.com, many of which are brand-new and designed for use with PowerPoint 2010. Go check them out, it can really fire up your imagination to see what's possible.

Of course, this is just a snapshot; if you've got ideas and tips you want to share about how to make great presentations, feel free to log a comment and let everyone know. We'd love to hear from you, and we'd love to hear more about what you think of the show. The folks at Office.com created this in partnership with our friends at Microsoft's Channel 9, where you can find even more videos about Office.

-- Doug Kim and Tina Wood Summerford,

Office Show producers

What you saw in my segments of The Office Show was a mixture of old PowerPoint and new PowerPoint 2010 features.

The Design Tab

Changing design to a new look and color is as easy as it looks in the video. In PowerPoint 2007 and above, you can preview changes as you mouse over the icons. You can change them quickly if you were caught in Tina and Laura’s scenario, but often the formatting will be off on some styles. However, you can change the theme color very quickly with no ill effect so no two presentations ever have to look the same. There are at least 20 color changes for each theme design.

See this introduction to themes for PowerPoint 2007.

Working with Images

When working with images (and we have over a hundred thousand free images at Office.com) ...

I had a lot of fun shooting the first episode of the Office Show. I never thought that while being a designer at Microsoft I'd end up playing with a blow-torch, but I'm not complaining.

In the show we talked about some of the great design features in PowerPoint. There's a host of powerful tools built into PowerPoint 2010 that make it really easy to create great looking presentations. Of course we wanted to stretch PowerPoint to show it off. In my segment of the show we worked with traditional animation techniques - called cel animation - that have been used by Disney and other hand drawn animation houses for nearly a hundred years. That allowed us to reuse background elements from frame to frame while redrawing elements in the foreground - woohoo for copy and paste!

A very talented colleague of mine - Ally Hood - hand drew every line of every shape inside PowerPoint using the built-in drawing tools. From there she animated certain foreground elements within some slides, while setting the transition (a cut) between slides to less than 1/5^th of a second. At that speed still images start to blur together and give the illusion of movement - just like that stick figure you drew in the corner of your high school math book - it's Ok, we all did it

The result of about 40 hours work was 150 custom created slides that took us through all four seasons in just 30 seconds. If you haven't seen it yet, you really should check the show out!

While you might not have time to do your own hand-drawn animation, there are a number of great, easy ways to add motion to PowerPoint. Here's more info on a few of them: