Introducing PowerPoint 2010
Yesterday Microsoft announced that the Office team has reached the technical preview engineering milestone for Microsoft Office 2010. We now kick-off the Technical Preview program mentioned in our June 25th posting. The big effect that this will have on the PowerPoint Team Blog is that the team can start talking publically about what we’ve been working on over the past two-plus years. As you can imagine, it is a very exciting time!
Over the next few months, the blog will showcase some of the marquee improvements we’ve made to PowerPoint 2010. The team is planning to do twice-weekly blog posts. Many of the first posts will be high-level introductions to new features like first-class video support, new distribution formats for presentations, collaborative authoring, the web-based version of PowerPoint and even broadcasting PowerPoint presentations to remote participants. Then we’ll make deep-dives into the user interfaces, programmability support and even the technical underpinnings of many of those features. Our hope is to share with you as much information about PowerPoint 2010 as possible.
To kick off these new PowerPoint 2010-focused posts, I’d like to give you a sneak peek at some of our new slide transitions. Transitions, the most basic animation type, have long been a staple of presentations. In PowerPoint 2010, based on feedback from presenters and audience members, we have made a substantial investment to our slide transition capabilities. In addition to providing a whole new set of slide transitions – with more coming after the Technical Preview – we have made existing slide transitions render faster and look more realistic. Here’s a quick look at some of the slide transitions you’ll see in PowerPoint 2010:
Over the next couple of weeks we’ll dive into the details of the newly improved Transitions tab user interface, a new class of transitions called content transitions, and even details about how the new transitions work in older versions of PowerPoint, and in the new ( yes, I said new! ) PowerPoint Viewer.
The PowerPoint team hopes that you will find these posts helpful in learning what is in store for PowerPoint 2010, and we hope that you’re as excited about this version as we are. We encourage everyone to check back often, or subscribe, to find out the latest about PowerPoint. Please give us your feedback by commenting right here in the blog!
Shawn Villaron
Group Program Manager, Microsoft Office PowerPoint
July 14, 2009
