PowerPoint has a lot of great preset shapes, but sometimes what you really need is a custom shape tailored-made for your presentation. If you’re looking to go beyond the Freeform Tool to create more complex custom shapes, we’ve created a new feature in PowerPoint 2010 called Combine Shapes to help you do just that! Using the principles of Boolean Geometry, the Combine Shapes tool allows you to create new shapes by combining multiple shapes in one of four ways: Union, Combine, Subtract, or Intersect.
This is a relatively advanced feature, so it doesn’t appear by default on the Ribbon. To enable Combine Shapes, add it to your Ribbon via the PowerPoint Options dialog: PowerPoint Options > Customize Ribbon > Commands Not in the Ribbon > Shape Combine, Intersect, Subtract, Union. (For more information on how to add items and customize your Ribbon and QAT, see this post).
In just a few clicks, you can quickly and easily create intricate and unique geometries by combining simple shapes in various ways. Here’s an example where we create a key shape using only ovals, rectangles, and triangles.
Step 1: Draw the silhouette of a key using several basic shapes, and merge them using “Shape Union” to create the body of the key:
Step 2: Draw shapes to represent the negative areas (i.e. the “holes” in the key). Select the body of the key first, then select the “holes”, and use “Shape Subtract” to cut them out:
Want even more control over the shape’s geometry? Custom shapes created using the Combine Shapes tool are freeforms, so you can take advantage of the Edit Points feature to further fine-tune your shape:
Add a gradient fill and some 3D effects to turn your custom shape into an eye-popping graphic!
With PowerPoint 2010, you no longer have to worry about not being able to find the perfect shape or Clip Art… if you can’t find one, create one yourself! Here are a few more examples of custom graphics created by PowerPoint’s Product Planner, Tal Krzypow, using the Combine Shapes tool:
Download the Office 2010 Beta today and try your hand at creating your own custom shapes. We’d love to hear what you think!
Chris Doan
Program Manager, Office Graphics
Updated (Feb 2): Changed the instructions to reflect the location of this feature in the PowerPoint 2010 Beta. Originally we posted instructions on how to find this feature in the released version.
As one of the newest program managers on the PowerPoint team (and a recovering history major), I’m always fascinated to hear the stories behind features I now can’t imagine living without. And as one of the engineers responsible for Accessibility in PowerPoint, I care a tremendous amount about the accessibility of the software we build. So you can imagine how happy I was to see these two interests collide in one of the latest posts to the Office Engineering Blog—a backstage peek at the new Document Accessibility Checker built in to Excel, Word, and PowerPoint 2010, written by Larry Waldman from the User Experience Team.
It turns out that the story behind the Document Accessibility Checker, like the story behind our new Video Triggers feature, begins with a user request. Actually, a lot of user requests:
While user interface accessibility has been well understood for years, the accessibility of Office document content is a burgeoning new area. In particular, we’ve seen many requests from companies and governments who have been wondering how to help their employees create accessible content. To solve this problem in Office 2010 we created a document Accessibility Checker (like a spell checker, but for accessibility issues) as a core feature of Word, Excel, and PowerPoint.
The rest of the post explains the Document Accessibility Checker in much greater detail, but the line “like a spell checker, but for accessibility issues” just about nails it.
Incidentally, Larry also highlights an unbelievably useful feature: new keyboard shortcuts for navigating the Ribbon and adjusting shapes. In PowerPoint 2010,
- Ctrl + Right/Left in the Ribbon navigates through command groups
- Shift + Right/Left/Up/Down resizes shapes
- Alt + Right/Left rotates shapes.
Though we built these new shortcuts with accessibility in mind, they end up making life easier for just about everyone. If you’re curious about the other keyboard shortcuts we swear by here on the PowerPoint team, you can read all about them here.
Working with the Office User Experience team over the past six months, I’ve been consistently floored by their dedication to making the Office experience as accessible as possible. With the addition of the Document Accessibility Checker, new keyboard shortcuts, and Video Triggers, PowerPoint 2010 will be the most accessible version yet—thanks to the hard work of engineers and designers, and feedback from customers like you. To take the new Document Accessibility Checker for a spin, download the PowerPoint 2010 Beta—and let us know what you think!
- Diana Kimball
Program Manager, PowerPoint
Microsoft Office Labs just released a fun new concept test called Ribbon Hero that lets you play games to improve your Office skills. Earn points while using Office, play a challenge to discover new features, or connect with Facebook to compete with your friends.
Learn more over at the Office Labs blog, and see how high you can get your PowerPoint score!
- Nathan Penner
Last week at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas, Microsoft set up a few booths on the floor to demo Office 2010 informally. I am very happy to hear that we engineers aren’t the only ones excited about the new multimedia features!
When I joined the team a year and a half ago, it didn’t take me very long to realize how much better my life would be now that I can embed, trim, and export videos all from within PowerPoint. After a little experimentation, I found that I can also present video material in a way that was previously impractical without spending a long time in complex, specialized software – I can now place two or more videos side-by-side so that they play the same time. By applying three-dimensional effects, reflections, and other correctional effects, I can set them up to look absolutely amazing.
Slowly but surely, with the release of the technical preview and public beta, others are starting to see just how great these tools are. Here is a clip of one CES attendee’s reaction to the new video features:
More information about Office at CES can be found here.
Whether you’ve snapped a few videos with your digital camera that you’d like to share with your family or you’ve got important video clips displaying a product in action for your sales pitch, you can now show them all in the best possible light using PowerPoint 2010. Download the beta today and try for yourself!
-Christopher Maloney
Many of you spend a lot of time working in PowerPoint. It’s become the top visual communications tool in business and is used to shape perception every day. But PowerPoint is only the instrument, you’re the master musician. Any great musician can tell you that it takes practice, practice, practice to master an instrument.
When Microsoft approached us to create an instructional template for PowerPoint 2010, we were thrilled. To actually be in PowerPoint, an application that we have a long history with, and to be able to share some principles of good presentation design with the world was a wonderful opportunity that we simply couldn’t pass up.
Just like how a master musician loves a difficult piece of music to challenge him, we wanted to give some of you masters out there a piece to deconstruct that’ll be a nice challenge—everything from Photoshop-looking graphics to Flash-like animations—all within PowerPoint.
First task to build this file was to take PowerPoint for a spin so that we could learn all its new features and tools and push those as we built the file. We were impressed with many of the new features because it gave us a new visual lexicon we could use to tell a story.
The foundation of the script came from the Manifesto: The Five Theses of the Power of a Presentation from our book slide:ology which are:
1) Treat Your Audience as King: They didn’t come to your presentation to see you. They came to find out what you can do for them. Make it clear what they are to do.
2) Spread Ideas and Move people: Communicate your ideas with strong visual grammar to engage all their senses and they will adopt the ideas as their own.
3) Help The Audience See What You’re Saying: Guide your audience through ideas in a way that helps, not hinders their comprehension. Appeal not only to their verbal senses, but to their visual senses as well.
4) Practice design, Not Decoration: Don’t just make pretty talking point. Instead, display information in a way that makes complex information clear.
5) Cultivate Healthy Relationships: Display information in the best way possible for comprehension rather than using slides as a crutch.
After we wove the rules into a narrative script with a strong storyline we storyboarded visuals to communicate the story in a clear, engaging way. Because presentations are usually digitally slick, we wanted to push the app to see if we could achieve a hand-crafted look for the piece which is a popular design trend right now.
We hand-sketched text and had employees dress in outfits from the 1950s. Using features within PowerPoint 2010 (film grain, color temperature, contrast) we transformed those images into retro-looking, “cut out” images. To bring the file to life, we created all of the animations within PowerPoint, using PowerPoint 2010s new animation features such as the bounce end (to give animation a natural movement) and the Animation Painter (a feature that we have been wanting for a long time). The new, more fluid transitions were also key to helping us complete the smooth journey through the features. We also wanted to take advantage of the new video features and embedded video with ease to help us reinforce our message.
We ask you to view the file that was posted as if it is a music score. It’s your turn now to study how it was done and hopefully use the features to make your next presentation SING!
—Nancy Duarte, Principal, Duarte Design, Inc.
In Office 2007, we significantly improved the rendering quality of static content. Users could quickly and easily enhance shapes, pictures, and other content with effects such as bevels, soft edges, and reflections. For Office 2010, we switched our focus to enhancing dynamic content - animations, transitions and video. To accomplish this, we rebuilt the core rendering engine using DirectX 9.0.
As a result, you’ll notice that PowerPoint 2010 is improved in four major ways:
Improved Slide Show Performance
Leveraging your graphics hardware allows us to greatly enhance the performance of presentations in slide show. This means that your presentations will look and feel smoother when running in PowerPoint 2010. In the video below there is a comparison of the same presentation running on the same hardware in both PowerPoint 2007 and PowerPoint 2010.
Revamped Animation and Transition Effects
We’ve taken advantage of DirectX to improve the look of existing animations and transitions. Animations and transitions that involve a wipe effect now feature a soft edge instead of a hard edge. Effects involving a fade now feature a silkier looking transformation. Take a look at the difference:
New Transition Effects
In addition to revamping the existing transitions, we've added a host of new transition effects to PowerPoint 2010. In a future post we’ll describe the effects and talk about the new Dynamic Content transitions.
Improved Video Playback
Finally, we've overhauled the way that we handle video playback. Previously, all video playback was achieved by launching external components (such as Windows Media Player) during slide show. Now, video playback is handled seamlessly inside PowerPoint. You’ll hear more about this in following posts.
In terms of system requirements, hardware rendering requires a DirectX 9.0 compatible video card, which is common on most machines capable of running Office 2010. In instances where this kind of graphics card is not available (e.g., terminal server, older machines…) we have a built-in mechanism to switch to software rendering.
-Shailesh Saini
Program Manager, Office Graphics
It’s exciting times for us here on the PowerPoint Engineering Team! Whiteboard brainstorms that began three years ago are now real live features, which are fully functional and ready for a test drive in the PowerPoint 2010 Beta! As we pass this milestone, I thought it’d be fun to share the inside scoop as to how one of our features, Video Triggers, came to be…
Video Triggers is a feature with which one can mark locations in a video (i.e. set bookmarks), and then trigger animation sequences upon reaching those bookmarks on playback of the video.
While most of our features are done “by the book” (i.e. we research them, we plan them, we know from day one that they’re in the product), Video Triggers didn’t fit that mold—this feature grew organically!
At an MVP summit two years ago, I was presenting our video feature set when one of our MVPs asked whether it’d be possible to support captioning of videos. She wanted to make videos more accessible for the hearing impaired.
We didn’t have this feature.
As I shared this request with the team, we discovered that we had many of the pieces, particularly the ability to make text appear and disappear, as the Animation Team quickly noted. Meanwhile, the Multimedia Team was implementing the ability to mark locations in video by adding bookmarks. We guessed that folks would primarily want use bookmarks to quickly find locations in a video navigation scenario, especially during a slide show when there is not much time to scrub through a video to find the important parts. Early usability studies, however, showed that almost no one wanted to do this. The bookmarks feature was headed for the gallows.
Around that time, we were seeing early concepts of a template on which we collaborated with Duarte Design (check out the “Five Rules” template which ships with Beta!) One of Duarte’s rules: “help [the audience] see what you’re saying.” I remember many of us thinking: how would we apply this advice to video? We let out a collective “Aha!,” and Video Triggers was born. We would allow users to meld videos with animations.
So let’s recap: You have a user request for video captions, a bookmark feature headed for the gallows, entrance and exit effects we’ve had for ages, and an ounce of “Aha!” Would you have guessed that those are the ingredients for Video Triggers? Oh yes, and to come full circle—our accessibility team is looking at building an add-in based off Video Triggers to facilitate the video captions scenario in particular.
On behalf of the entire PowerPoint Team, we hope you’ll love the PowerPoint 2010 Beta. Please! Tell us what you think. You never know— it might be the genesis of another great feature!
Jeffrey Chen
Lead Program Manager, PowerPoint Client
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!
| · Sean Lyndersay |
| · PM Lead, PowerPoint Web App |
| o (and part-time text fiend) |
| § Yes, many of us work on both the desktop app |
| § and the web app |
PowerPoint 2010 has new features that can help bring your stories to life and make your messages more compelling. We’ve even included sample templates to give you ideas, including some tips from Duarte Design. We approached Nancy Duarte after she gave a talk at our campus with the idea of creating a cinematic presentation, especially for you. Working with her team was such a treat, and it was great to see how they took advantage of the capabilities of PowerPoint 2010 to create an amazingly effective presentation.
Once you download the Microsoft Office 2010 Public Beta, you can get your own copy of Duarte’s Five Rules for Creating Great Presentations. Click on the File tab, and you’ll find the presentation in Sample Templates under the New tab.
Here’s a sneak peak video that was created with our brand new video export feature. You’ll want to turn up your speakers for this one:
Read more about this presentation on the Duarte blog.
Enjoy!
Sandy Yu
Program Manager, Microsoft PowerPoint
…were created entirely in PowerPoint 2010. Many of you have been wondering how this is possible; it must be some kind of joke. Does PowerPoint make video? Allow me to formally introduce our new “Create a Video” feature. With just a couple clicks, anyone can make a video of his or her presentation which is easy to distribute, share, or archive. Check out this “marketing” video that some of our engineers created and uploaded to YouTube:
Whether for marketing your product, teaching a lecture, or creating a highlight reel from your last vacation, our aim is to take all the things you already do in PowerPoint and re-create them in video. Your video will include everything you already put in your slide shows: text, animations, transitions, narrations and media.
Video is such a dynamic, engaging way to present content, but it’s always been difficult for most people to create video content beyond shooting a clip with a digital camera. I’m excited about this feature because it puts video content at your fingertips instead of forcing you to use complicated video editing software. If you can imagine it in PowerPoint, you can create a video of it. And with a video, you can distribute it to anyone with a computer or DVD player, post it to YouTube, burn it to DVD, put it on SharePoint, or upload it to Facebook. If you’ve downloaded the publicly-available PowerPoint 2010 Beta, you can create a video by going to the File tab, and looking for the Create a Video button under the Share tab.
Thanks for taking a read! Please comment if you have any questions or feedback.
Allen Huang
PowerPoint PM
Office 2007 introduced users to the Ribbon, a menu replacement that made application functionality easier to find and faster to use in Word, Excel and PowerPoint. However, a common user request was for a level of customizability beyond adding commands to the Quick Access Toolbar.
 | The Quick Access Toolbar with the Selection Pane command added |
Well, it’s a whole new Office in 2010. A recent post in the Microsoft Office 2010 Engineering blog announces the direct answer to that request: a customizable Ribbon.
| | Hello, my name is Melissa Kerr and I am a Program Manager on the Office User Experience team.Today I'm introducing the era of “This is your Ribbon!”, made possible by the new Ribbon customization feature available in Office 2010. Ribbon customization is available across all Office 2010 client applications, and allows you to create a personalized Ribbon optimized to the way you work with the application. Customization is the ability to add, remove and relocate commands within an application, and is not a new idea. It began with Command Bars in Office 97, progressed to the Quick Access Toolbar in Office 2007, and now has evolved to include Ribbon customization with Office 2010… |
Read Melissa’s entire post here. The illustrations in that article show the customization process in Word 2010. But just to assure you, it’s right here in PowerPoint 2010 as well…
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| | A right click on the Ribbon brings up the Customize the Ribbon command, the entry point to making the Ribbon your own | |
Ric Bretschneider
Senior Program Manager, Microsoft PowerPoint
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Today, we are announcing the availability of the PowerPoint 2010 Beta.
It is a public download that anyone can try for free. |
What can you do with PowerPoint 2010?
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- Author your presentations in less time using the new Animation Painter, Animation Ribbon, Transition Ribbon, and Smart Guides
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- Organize your presentations more effectively with Sections
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- Streamline your workflow on large screens and multiple monitor setups by opening multiple presentations each in a separate window
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- Present technical content containing Equations
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- And what would presentations be, if we didn't include a Laser Pointer
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Get your Office 2010 Beta download today! Take us out for a spin and tell us what you think.
Check back soon (or subscribe via RSS) to learn even more about these cool new features!
-The PowerPoint Team
Your task: create a presentation.
There are lots of ways to approach this depending on what you’re trying to convey to your audience, and there are many things to consider: the message, content, flow, slide design, aesthetics, and a variety of other factors involved in storytelling.
Sometimes it’s helpful to start with a template. This way, you can set aside certain aspects of the design such as layout and visual effects so that you can focus your efforts elsewhere.
The folks who run Office Online have provided everyone with a collection of slides, designed by PowerPoint MVP Julie Terberg, which you are free to use in your own presentations. They can serve as a starting point for the rest of the deck (much like a template), or you can use them simply as inspiration for some special effects. A little eye candy can really captivate an audience.
Here’s a short video showing samples from the collection:
For more tips, check out last week’s design intervention post, in which Julie helps a law student make some key last-minute changes to her slides. Additional design-related posts are listed here.
-Chris
Now that you’ve learned about PowerPoint Web App’s Reading View – designed for quickly reading presentations that have been published on the web -- we’d like to introduce you to Edit View. Edit View is, unsurprisingly, the place where you go to make changes to your presentation on the web.
To begin with, we designed this view to parallel our desktop app’s Normal View. On the web, you’ll find the familiar ribbon, thumbnail pane, and notes pane. Take a look at the desktop app and the web app side-by-side:
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| PowerPoint 2010 Normal View |
| PowerPoint 2010 Web App Edit View |
Fast, Simple and Trustworthy
As we’ve discussed in previous posts, the PowerPoint Web App has been designed as a companion to the PowerPoint desktop application. The desktop app is great for creating beautiful presentations (see some examples here), and for giving presentations that take advantage of the full power of the local machine. The web app is focused on giving you access to your presentations wherever you are, quickly and easily.
Looking beyond viewing and giving presentations, we knew that people would want to be able to make changes to their presentations from anywhere. Our primary goal is to provide you with a fast and streamlined editing experience, optimized for simple changes on the run. Most importantly, however, we made sure that no matter what changes you make, the fidelity of your document will be preserved.
The latter point is by far the most critical one. The PowerPoint desktop app has been in development for over 20 years. It supports hundreds of features. In the first version of the web app, we knew that we would not be able to support all of them. So we focused on building a foundation for the editing experience that would ensure that even if the web app doesn’t support direct editing of a particular feature, the feature would be perfectly preserved in the document for later editing in the desktop app.
For example, let’s say that you are editing a title that has a 3D rotation and a reflection applied to it. PowerPoint Web App will let you change the text and font, as well as apply other basic formatting. The 3D rotation and reflection will not be stripped off the text simply because the web app doesn’t support editing those properties. They will be maintained and automatically merged with the changes you’ve made to the text.
This attention to the tiny details of document fidelity mean that you can confidently store and edit your presentations on the web, secure in the knowledge that all parts of the presentation will be intact the next time you open it on the PowerPoint desktop app.
Streamlined editing on the web
Of course, you want to know what you’ll be able to edit. We focused on the most important and common editing activities.
We began with the most basic activities: adding, re-ordering and deleting slides. When you add a new slide, all of the layouts in the presentation are available for you to choose from, just as they are in the desktop app. So if you’re working with a presentation created from a corporate template or one downloaded from Office Online, you’ll be able to use the custom layouts from the template.
Next, we focused on text editing. You can make most common changes to text in placeholders – font, size, and color, to name a few. As described above, you’ll notice that when you make changes to text that has advanced effects applied (reflections, shadows, etc.), those effects are maintained with full fidelity and are automatically reapplied to the edited text.
Many PowerPoint presentations are full of pictures, so we made sure that you can not only insert and delete pictures, but you can also easily apply the same Quick Styles found in the desktop app.
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| | The Picture Tools tab contains a gallery with some of the same Quick Styles available in PowerPoint. |
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| | Expanding the gallery reveals the complete set. |
Of course, if you have a picture perfectly formatted, but you find that you need to you swap in a new picture, you can use Change Picture and keep all of your original formatting.
Office 2007 introduced SmartArt graphics – a new type of graphic that changes automatically based on the content. The ability to create and edit SmartArt graphics in the web app was a natural and important addition. Watch for a future post with many more details!
Navigating to and from Edit View
You can go directly into Edit View (click Edit on Skydrive or SharePoint) or switch over from Reading View. If you are in Reading View, the toolbar across the top of the view has an entry point, shown below.
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| | PowerPoint Web App Reading View Toolbar |
Notice that when Edit View opens, you’re still on the same slide you were just reading!
If you want to see how your slides will look animated, you can switch back into Reading View or check out your progress in Slide Show from the View Tab.
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| | PowerPoint Web App Edit View, displaying the View Tab. |
Give us your thoughts!
This is only the beginning. We will continue to improve the web editing experience. As to what’s next? We’d love to hear your opinion! What’s the most common thing that you want to do on the web? Please leave comments or submit feedback as you use the technical preview!
| Rebecca Loew |
| Program Manager, PowerPoint Web App Edit View |
November 11, 2009
What’s the next best thing to getting someone to critique your PowerPoint presentation for design and effectiveness for free? Well, watching someone else get that advice may come in as a fairly close second.
This video will re-introduce you to Julie Terberg of Terberg Design. Regular PowerPoint Team Blog readers will recall Julie’s work from last year’s post: A Picture + 1000 Words… where we spotlighted the amazing and beautiful sample shape and animations she created for you to download.
A talented and sought-after design consultant, Julie worked with Microsoft again to put together this video for the Microsoft Showcase. It tells the story of Seattle law student Courtney Hudak as she prepares for an important class presentation on human rights. Courtney receives some timely and actionable advice from… well, let’s just watch…
Office Intervention: PowerPoint Make-Over! Ric Bretschneider
Senior Program Manager, Microsoft PowerPoint
