The PowerPoint Team Blog

Free PowerPoint Design Intervention

RicB — Mon, 02 Nov 2009 18:27:13 GMT

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

Office Web Apps preview expanding

pptteam — Tue, 20 Oct 2009 23:27:26 GMT

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

PowerPoint 2010: Just One Click Away

pptteam — Thu, 15 Oct 2009 22:06:13 GMT

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

PowerPoint on the Web: A New View of Your Presentation

RicB — Mon, 12 Oct 2009 05:11:00 GMT

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.

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.


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:

Quick access to the Edit and Slide Show views

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

Additional controls to allow faster “browsing” and locating slides within the deck

A notes pane

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.


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

Introducing Broadcast Slide Show

pptteam — Fri, 09 Oct 2009 06:13:39 GMT

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

World’s Best Presentation 2009

pptteam — Wed, 07 Oct 2009 00:48:48 GMT

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

The 2010 Save: Accident Prevention

pptteam — Wed, 30 Sep 2009 21:23:26 GMT

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.

PowerPoint on Facebook

pptteam — Wed, 23 Sep 2009 19:45:14 GMT

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:

Visit http://www.facebook.com/pages/#/pages/Microsoft-PowerPoint/80007646730?ref=sgm
Near the top of the page, click .

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

Office Web Apps Publicly Available today

pptteam — Fri, 18 Sep 2009 01:03:47 GMT

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:

A New Way to Paste

pptteam — Wed, 16 Sep 2009 06:14:00 GMT

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

The New World of Co-Authoring

pptteam — Fri, 11 Sep 2009 08:05:05 GMT

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

Animation Painter

pptteam — Fri, 04 Sep 2009 10:54:52 GMT

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

A Brand New Slide Show...

pptteam — Tue, 25 Aug 2009 08:48:27 GMT

Over the years, PowerPoint has gone through a number of graphic improvements. Our goal is always to provide the best environment for you to visualize and communicate your ideas. At the beginning of this release, we looked at how advancements in motion graphics have transformed visual storytelling in broadcast TV and movies. We knew we wanted to bring the same capabilities to presentations.

For PowerPoint 2010, we are making the biggest visual update to Slide Show in nearly a decade. PowerPoint's graphics engine is completely rebuilt using DirectX. Everything in slide show (text, shapes, animations, and more) is rendered in full 3D using your machine’s graphics card. Over the next few weeks, we’ll show you how to use PowerPoint 2010’s new tools and effects to improve your presentation.

Here are a few of the features you can expect to see:

· Fully hardware-accelerated rendering engine

· New transition effects and an updated user interface

· Revamped animation effects and a brand new UI (timelines!)

· Animation Painter (copy your animations between objects)

· Choreograph animations with multimedia

As we like to say here at PowerPoint, if a picture is worth 1,000 words, then a video is worth at least 24,000 per second:

- Jason Zhao and Christopher Maloney

Program Manager, PowerPoint Slide Show

August 25, 2009

Safety First: Office 2010 Protected View

pptteam — Thu, 20 Aug 2009 01:09:00 GMT

When you open presentations downloaded from the Internet in PowerPoint 2010, you’ll enter into the new Protected View. While in this mode, PowerPoint runs in a “sandbox,” which means that you are now better isolated from any malicious code that could be contained within the file. In the past, you had to decide if you trusted the author/origin of the document before viewing the contents. Now, with Protected View, you can make a more informed decision before exposing your computer to potential vulnerabilities.

As you can tell from the excerpt below, Protected View makes it much more difficult for malware to take over your machine:

“…Protected View is one of the many security defenses in Office 2010. For a malware to actually be able to run in Protected View it will first need to find a way around DEP, ASLR, GS and our new 2010 Office File validation checks. After all that, the malware would need to find a way to break out of the sandbox.”

To learn more about this great feature, check out the full post on the Office 2010 Engineering Blog.

Optimizing Your Media for the World

pptteam — Thu, 13 Aug 2009 06:07:00 GMT

Welcome to the 21st century. Computers are omnipresent. The extent of your audience is no longer constrained to a single conference room or the space just over your left shoulder. Whether you are sharing the videos from your recent trip with your family hundreds of miles away or presenting a media-rich business plan to potential customers on the other side of the globe, your slides need to work on computers other than the one right in front of you.

It’s simple, right? Just attach the presentation to an email and click send. If you’ve ever tried this with video in PowerPoint 2007, you’ve probably realized that talk is cheap. In the past, you needed to attach all the video files separately, and you needed to ensure that those files would reach a location on the recipient’s computer that would preserve the links from the presentation.

In PowerPoint 2010, media you insert from your hard-drive is embedded directly into your presentation unless you specifically choose to link. From now on, you only need to worry about a single file - the presentation:

You send the presentation to your friend, and they tell you, "there was an error. Those videos don’t play on my computer." It's very likely that you downloaded a special media decoder at some point, either on purpose or by accident, in order to play that media on your computer. You could ask your friend to install the same decoder, but that's asking a lot (especially if you aren't sure which one is required). This is why we've created the Optimize Media Compatibility feature. Clicking this button in the Backstage will help to ensure that your files playback on other computers:

Now your media is embedded, and you are confident that it will play on any computer. Time to send this in an email. You’ve got a list of recipients, a subject, a message, and you've even remembered to attach the file. You click send. Three minutes later, you receive an email saying that your attachment is too large to send…

Don't worry. Just return to the Backstage and click on the new Compress Media button. This will drastically reduce the size of your media files:

PowerPoint will discard your trimmed regions so that you don't waste space showing a short clip from a long movie. The media are then processed with some very intelligent algorithms which selectively remove data while minimizing the impact to the overall quality of the video and audio.

Your worries about linking, compatibility, and filesize have all been rolled into two simple buttons. All you have to do is click, and we’ll take care of the rest.

There are, of course, other ways to share you brilliant work that don’t involve sending a presentation at all. If you want to learn more, check back soon!

-Christopher Maloney

August 12, 2009