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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
As Nick just posted on the Office Web Apps blog, we’re expanding access to the technical preview!
For a limited time, you can sign-up for a Technical Preview account here: http://skydrive.live.com/acceptpreview.aspx/.documents?aobrp=browse.
Note: if you’re already in the technical preview, or you’re not in the US or Japan, you’ll get an error message, if you click the link.
So click away, and check out our previous blog posts on the PowerPoint Web app:
Sean
Thanks to advancements in application virtualization technology, you’ll have the option to run the full version of Microsoft Office 2010 without the need to wait for installation, even if you have previous versions of Microsoft Office already installed. Similar to streaming a video over the internet, we send you the data you need to start the applications first, and then continue to download or “buffer” the rest of the application in the background. With this new way of running Office, you don’t need an optical drive, you can save more space on your disk drive, and you’ll always be running the most up-to-date version that is available.
To learn more about this new deployment technology and other ways of acquiring Office 2010, check out this post on the Office Engineering Blog. You’ll learn there that new Windows computers will ship with Office Starter 2010 instead of the Microsoft Works application that once appeared on new PCs. For users who want to accomplish more with richer tools, such as creating presentations with PowerPoint 2010, upgrading to the full version of Office is simple and quick.
-Christopher Maloney
Hopefully by now you’ve heard about the new versions of your favorite Microsoft Office applications that are showing up on the web. A large part of the effort behind Office 2010 has been to bring Word, Excel, OneNote and PowerPoint functionality to SharePoint and Windows Live, enabling a whole new range of distribution and interactivity.
You may even have tried these out for yourself in the preview SkyDrive customers are currently invited to explore. If you have, please let us know what you think, and if you haven’t, well, you still have time to check it out.
Creating New Experiences
We’ve done our best to create web experiences for the applications that will feel comfortable to current customers, but we’ve also extended the applications to anticipate and take advantage of some brand new ways of using and viewing documents.
Today I’m going to give you a little background into one of these new areas, the PowerPoint Web App Reading View.
PowerPoint documents were originally fairly simple collections of images, displayed as a presenter spoke. The slides reinforced the spoken message. Typically, they didn’t encompass complete messages. The speaker filled in the heart of what was being presented. Over the years, we’ve seen an evolution in presentations, and now many business documents are created exclusively in PowerPoint. Often the slides are distributed to those not able to attend, or for general reference. In lieu of presenter, it’s a common best practice to annotate the slides with text in each slide’s notes panes.
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| A good set of notes associated with the slide can complete the document’s message for readers. |
The recipient of a PowerPoint document really has two choices. Read it in the PowerPoint Normal view, or watch it as a Slide Show. If they read it in the Normal view, they’ll see the notes but it will be missing animation and rich media. If they choose the Slide Show, they’ll see animation and transitions, but miss the slide notes. In addition, complex slide animations are often unintelligible unless viewed in the full screen Slide Show. Addressing this has been one of the focus points of the Web App.
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| Viewed in the Normal view, animated shapes may be stacked up… | …missing the effect… | …of sequential animation. |
Flexibility and Support
In anticipating how people might use of the PowerPoint Web Application, we decided early that we needed more than just the application’s current Editing and Slide Show views. Documents that live on the web are often accessed by many more people than just the presenter. A stranger to the document won’t know, for example, how many slide builds there are on a particular slide, and really doesn’t benefit from bullet points that build in on each click. At the same time, animation can be essential to the meaning of some slides, and flattening that animation to a static image can potentially eliminate part of the message.
So the default view of presentations in the Web App both preserves animations, and allows the viewing of slide notes. So the PowerPoint Web App’s default view is a new reading-optimized view, with the following components:
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A resizable window – with Silverlight installed the presentation will automatically resize to fit the window dimensions -
Slide transitions, object and text animation, live in the browser. Animation timings honor their original settings, and animations set to advance on click work just as you’d expect |
Jumping and Running
Someone who isn’t familiar with a presentation may need help in getting around, or finding material of specific interest. Two ways of doing this are providing a faster way of browsing through slides, or viewing a list of slides so you can jump directly to the slide you want.
The navigation bar beneath the slide provides this function. The fast forward buttons move through slides, skipping things like object and bullet builds and showing fully built slides that will be more recognizable.
Between the fast forward buttons is a pop-up menu that allows direct “jump” access to specific slides. Slide titles show up in this control, making it easy to find just the right slide. For large decks, the slides are grouped in sections that expand when clicked, making for quick scanning through a deck with a minimum of mouse movement.
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| The slide menu provides direct access to slides… | …slides are grouped into sections… | …that can be opened with a click. |
Using these controls readers can quickly scan a presentation or jump directly to a slide of interest.
Access to Slide Show and Edit View, and More of course…
Finally, the slender top ribbon contains links to the two companion views, Edit and Slide Show. As you might expect, these will feel very familiar to PowerPoint’s Normal view and Slide Show command. We’ll cover both of these in a later post.
For now, we hope you’ll try out the PowerPoint Web App. Please send us your impressions, and how you think you’ll end up using it!
Ric Bretschneider
Senior Program Manager – Microsoft PowerPoint
In today’s world, you often need to communicate with people in different locations who can’t get together in the same room. When you’re presenting, you want everyone to see your slide show at the same time -- whether they’re sitting next to you or joining on the phone from 10,000 miles away.
PowerPoint 2010 makes it easy to present on the fly to anyone, anywhere. Just send a link, and in one click everyone you invite will be watching a synchronized view of your slide show in their browser. You’ll never again need to email bulky attachments or make an announcement every time you change slides.
Watch this video to see how it works:
The workflow is simple: just open any presentation in PowerPoint, click Broadcast Slide Show, and connect to the PowerPoint Broadcast Service. You’ll receive a unique link that you can email or IM to remote attendees. Then, start the slide show and present the same way you do for every presentation you give with PowerPoint.
Attendees listening on the phone or a conference call need to click only once to open your link in their Web browser and watch your broadcast. Their view will update automatically to show your current slide and play animations as you show them. This view has the same cross-platform, cross-browser support as the Office Web Apps.
With Whom Can I Share?
All PowerPoint 2010 users can access the PowerPoint Broadcast Service using a Windows Live ID. When you start a broadcast, it will provide a public link that you can send to anyone on the Internet you invite.
Organizations will also have the flexibility to host their own broadcast services and set permissions for who can create and view broadcasts.
-Nathan Penner
October 8, 2009
Last week, the online presentation hosting site SlideShare announced the winners of their annual “World’s Best Presentation Contest.” On their website, you’ll find thousands entries for your viewing pleasure. What a great place to search for design inspiration.
In a report from BusinessWeek:
SlideShare's contest winners prove that PowerPoint is not evil, as some have suggested. "PowerPoint is a tool," says Kawasaki. "People who tell you that PowerPoint is evil don't know how to use it."
Of about 3,000 entries, one was selected by voters and judges as the “World’s Best:”
Here is the full list of top presentations for 2009. Take a look; the stories are great, the visuals are appealing, and some of the messages are very interesting!
-Christopher Maloney
You’re on the way out the door. You need to shut down your computer first, and there are 15 different applications open. You press the power button, and a couple of the open applications remind you that your work hasn’t been saved yet. You have the option to “Save” or “Don’t Save.” You are moving quickly, and in the heat of the moment you accidently click “Don’t Save.”
5 milliseconds later you’re breathing in through your teeth and clenching your fist, wishing you just looked at the document first before throwing away all the edits you made on the presentation you are rushing to deliver. Oops.
The new version of Office has built-in protection for scenarios like this. Even if you “Don’t Save,” we keep an easily accessible draft version around for a few days. In the case that you pressed the wrong button, all your information is just a few clicks away.
Take a deep breath. We got your back.
Microsoft PowerPoint now has its very own fan page on Facebook, which means you now have an easy way to get free tips about your favorite program, share ideas about the ways you use PowerPoint, and get answers to PowerPoint-related questions that you’ve always wanted to ask.
The nice thing about joining the PowerPoint fan page is that it integrates nicely with Facebook’s existing news feed and notification system. You can choose to see Help & How-to tips in your Facebook news feed automatically or read them only when you want to. Similarly, if you post something on the fan page, you can choose to be notified whenever someone responds to you.
Here’s a quick walkthrough of how the Microsoft PowerPoint fan page on Facebook works:
Join the PowerPoint fan page (it’s free!)
If you already have a Facebook account, sign in, and then follow these simple steps:
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Visit http://www.facebook.com/pages/#/pages/Microsoft-PowerPoint/80007646730?ref=sgm
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Near the top of the page, click 
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Now you’ll be able to keep in touch and receive updates directly through your newsfeed. I hope to see you out there!
| -Joy Miller |
| Microsoft Office, User Assistance |
As noted in Brian’s post on the Windows Live blog:
Today is a real milestone for people who use Microsoft Office or Windows Live. Starting today, a select group of SkyDrive customers will be invited to try out a technical preview of the online versions of Microsoft Excel, Word and PowerPoint, also known as the Office Web Apps, integrated right inside their Windows Live SkyDrive experience. Over time, as the final version is released, the Office Web Apps will become available to all 500 million+ users of Hotmail, Messenger and other Windows Live services.
Read more here: Office Web Apps on Windows Live.
If you’re one of the lucky ones that gets access, please check out the features and let us know what you think. As a reminder from my earlier post, we focused on four core scenarios:
- Reading a presentation anywhere – either your own or one that was shared with you – with high-fidelity.
- Giving a standard presentation anywhere and to anyone.
- Sharing your presentation with others.
- Making key edits to the presentation anywhere.
We’ll have blog posts talking about these features over the next few weeks. We look forward to your feedback.
Sean Lyndersay
Lead PM, PowerPoint Web App
PS. Here is the video from the Windows Live blog post:
Have you ever tried to paste some Excel data into PowerPoint presentation? If you just press the paste button or Ctrl+V, PowerPoint will apply theme formatting to the table. Sometimes, however, you just want the table to look the same as it did in the spreadsheet. Maybe you just want to paste the table as an image. As described on the Office Engineering Blog:
“In Office 2010, we’re combining the rich functionality of the Paste Special dialog and the Paste Recovery feature into a new Paste Options gallery. The Paste Options gallery includes Live Preview – hovering over each Paste item allows users to preview the Paste formatting with their actual content. The new Paste Options gallery helps users get the right results the first time, making the task of copying and pasting content into a document quicker and easier by eliminating the repetitive process of pasting, undoing and trying again.”
You simply hover over one of the paste options to see a preview of what you’ll get. This helps you achieve the results you are looking for without wasting any time. We’ve exposed the most common options for each object, so that you can focus on your presentation. For example, here are the paste options for a table:
I hope you find this new feature as useful as I do. It’s all over Office 2010, and it really makes things easier.
-Christopher Maloney
August 15, 2009
Like Microsoft Word, PowerPoint has made a significant investment in document co-authoring for the Office 2010 release. What is co-authoring? This is the capability for multiple users to open the same presentation file and to simultaneously edit and save changes to that file. Co-authoring solves a lot of problems with the current models of collaboration, where multiple versions of files are stored at multiple locations, not to mention the proliferation of presentations circulating via e-mail amongst multiple contributors. Now, one version of the file can exist in a shared network location, and users can edit, save, print and present from that one location.
The Presentation Lifecycle
We have often observed that the nature of editing conducted over a presentation’s lifecycle will vary. In the beginning, content is typically roughly formed, initially perhaps bulleted plain text or a compendium of objects such as rich media including pictures and video, charts, slides from other presentations, etc. copied from a variety of external sources.
During a presentation’s “middle age”, the scope of the presentation is coming into focus, concepts are more clearly defined and logical groupings of slide & topic flow form. As the presentation delivery milestone approaches, fewer edits are necessary, and those edits tend to be a bit more critical. To accommodate various co-authoring workflows, review of the changes that other co-authors make is optional (though easy to initiate), allowing for flexibility during the different stages of the presentation lifecycle.
Easy to Use
Simplicity is one of the hallmarks of good design and we’ve made co-authoring extremely easy to use. It is integrated into PowerPoint seamlessly – there are no specific modules or add-ins to use or to install. Users continue to edit their presentation content normally, with no extra effort required. Saving locally edited content automatically updates the presentation file on the server which makes that content available to other co-authoring users. Other co-authors can see who is editing the presentation and where in the document they are working. Changes made by other co-authors get merged into your document and you can edit in reaction to those changes.
On Your Server, or In the Cloud
In corporate environments, responsibilities for different sections of a presentation are often assigned to different individuals, who are often located in different parts of the company. Via a shared location on a Microsoft SharePoint server, users can co-author content when and where convenient.
We also recognize that authors of PowerPoint content are often on the go. With the modern workforce, work does not always happen inside the cubicle. Consultants creating content for their customers need to share presentations with their customers, and they may not have access to the customer’s corporate network infrastructure. In addition, small business customers may not have a server infrastructure deployed. Office 2010 has made it easy to support these scenarios by allowing co-authoring to function in the “cloud.”
In future posts, we’ll talk more about more details and the architecture of the co-authoring system. Stay tuned!
-Dave Kesterson
September 10, 2009
Creating a good presentation usually involves a number of steps: organizing your thoughts, developing a story, adding the content to your slides, and then taking some time to adjust the design so that it is aesthetically pleasing and appropriate for the setting. Adding animations is often a nice finishing touch.
Once you apply an animation to an object, there are a variety of settings and adjustments to help you fine-tune for a more polished effect. It’s quite common to then apply that same animation (with the same settings) to a number of other objects in the presentation, forming a coherent style. The question is: how can one do this without repeating the same clicking pattern over, and over, and over?
Introducing the Animation Painter
In PowerPoint 2010 we’re introducing the Animation Painter. Just select an object with animations, select the “Animation Painter” button on the Animations tab, and with a single click you can transfer the all the animations and settings to another object. If you double-click the painter button, you’ll be in “Sticky Mode” so that you can paint multiple objects sequentially.
You may recognize this workflow from the widely-used format painter, which allows you to transfer settings such as font, color, and size. Here’s a short video of the Animation Painter in action:
Now, life is just that much easier.
-Christopher Maloney
September 4, 2009
