Welcome to "The Office Show: PowerPoint Design"

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