The PowerPoint Team Blog : Tips and Tricks

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.

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

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

How to insert that funny clip you found online

RicB — Thu, 20 Nov 2008 02:55:00 GMT

Hey everyone, my name is Allen Huang, and I’m one of the Program Managers that works on multimedia in PowerPoint. Although we’re busy working on the next version of PowerPoint, I wanted to take some time to share with you a neat trick I’ve learned in PowerPoint 2007. It also works in older versions of PowerPoint, but I’m going to focus on showing how it works in 2007.

PowerPoint users are often asking how to get their YouTube or MSN SoapBox videos into PowerPoint. It takes a little bit of work to get it in, but now you can have “History of Dance” playing in your presentation too.

There a few setup steps before we get into actually inserting that video:

Make sure you have the Adobe Flash Player installed on your computer

If you’re watching videos on YouTube, you probably already have Adobe Flash Player installed. Otherwise, go to http://www.adobe.com/products/flashplayer/ to download it.

Enable the Developer tab

Look for the Developer tab on your ribbon. If it’s not already there, go to the Office menu, where you’ll find a “PowerPoint options” button on the bottom. Select this button to get a dialog box like the one below.

Check the “Show Developer tab in Ribbon” checkbox. After you close this dialog, the Developer tab should appear on your ribbon.

Find the web address for the video you want to put in PowerPoint

The web provides tons of websites that supply user-created, user-uploaded video. YouTube is probably the most popular, but MSN Soapbox, MetaCafe, and DailyMotion are other examples of sites like YouTube. Once you find the video, look for the “Embed code” that allows you to embed a video on a blog or another webpage.

The screenshots below show a couple places where you might find this.

Once you’ve copied this code, paste it in Notepad or any other text editor. I’ve highlighted the two snippets you’ll need below:

<object width="425" height="344"><param name="movie" value="http://www.youtube.com/v/dMH0bHeiRNg&hl=en&fs=1"></param><param name="allowFullScreen" value="true"></param><param name="allowscriptaccess" value="always"></param><embed src="http://www.youtube.com/v/dMH0bHeiRNg&hl=en&fs=1" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" allowscriptaccess="always" allowfullscreen="true" width="425" height="344"></embed></object>

The two places where you’ll find the URL that you need are bolded in the above example. Most of the time you’ll find this URL after “value=” or “embed src=”. Hold onto that URL (http://www.youtube.com/v/dMH0bHeiRNg&hl=en&fs=1), because that’s what we’ll need to make this work in PowerPoint. put in PowerPoint to insert the video.

For MSN Soapbox, the parts you’ll need are a little different. Again, the parts you’ll need are highlighted :

<embed src="http://images.video.msn.com/flash/soapbox1_1.swf" width="432" height="364" id="p6vu3jr0" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" allowFullScreen="true" allowScriptAccess="always" pluginspage="http://macromedia.com/go/getflashplayer" flashvars="c=v&v=be9075bb-df0a-41c9-8d86-7ded46627e26&ifs=true&fr=msnvideo&mkt=en-US"></embed><noembed><a href="http://video.msn.com/video.aspx?vid=be9075bb-df0a-41c9-8d86-7ded46627e26" target="_new" title="Bill Gates' Last Day - CES Clip">Video: Bill Gates' Last Day - CES Clip</a></noembed>

In this case, you’ll need to get the URL after src=”, but you’ll also need the flashvars. All you need to do is add a “?” after the src URL and add the flashvars, like below:

http://images.video.msn.com/flash/soapbox1_1.swf?c=v&v=be9075bb-df0a-41c9-8d86-7ded46627e26&ifs=true&fr=msnvideo&mkt=en-US

What to do once you’re in PowerPoint

Now that all of that’s out of the way, go to the Developer tab and pick the “More controls” dialog (the icon looks like a little hammer/wrench icon).

In this dialog, select “Shockwave Flash Object” and hit OK. Your cursor should be a crosshair now, and you can draw the size for the video. When you let go, there’ll be a box with an X through it. Then select “Properties” from the Developer tab, you’ll get a second dialog that provides lots of options for this Flash object.

Paste the embed code in the blank “Movie” property, and then press Enter. Now when you enter slideshow, the video should appear, and you should be able to interact with it like you would on the website you got it from.

What you’re doing in PowerPoint is inserting an ActiveX control in PowerPoint, which allows you to host other applications in PowerPoint. In the list of “More controls”, you’ll find a Windows Media Player ActiveX control, an Adobe Reader control, and many others that you can manipulate using the “Properties” dialog.

A few additional notes

If you’re presenting with the video, be sure you have an Internet connection, and be prepared for any loading times there might be.
Although you’ll see an EmbedMovie property in the Properties list for the Shockwave Flash Player, it will not actually embed the movie in your presentation. You should ignore that setting.
Due to differences in the file formats, if you’re going to be creating this file in PowerPoint 2007 and then distributing it to someone using an earlier version of PowerPoint, be sure to save as .PPT.

Enjoy Rickrolling your friends in PowerPoint! Reply back and let us know how it works for you!

One More Special Intern and the PowerPoint Prototype

RicB — Mon, 15 Sep 2008 03:37:36 GMT

It does seem like we've been featuring a lot of material on Microsoft interns lately, but this one is a little different. Hope you'll agree and enjoy one last post in the series.

Kris Jordan recently interned with the Microsoft Visual Studio team. Like many technical and enthusiastic students, he runs a personal blog where he reports on his own experiences and things that get his attention. Recently he wrote a entry on prototyping software user interface and user experiences with PowerPoint. This was accompanied by a video example of his techniques and advice. The video is embedded here as well, just to the right.

It's really exciting to see people notice this outside of the PowerPoint and Office team. We've been using PowerPoint like this for years now, but you'd expect it of us! Having others expand their use of PowerPoint this way is really exciting. It particularly fun to watch him smoothly and quickly do the prototype in the video. Way to go Kris!

The first formal use of PowerPoint for user interface planning happened back in the mid-90's when program managers Howard Cooperstein and Peter Wu were working on the interface to a shared graphics editing experience across Word, Excel and PowerPoint for the new shared graphics engine now known as Office Art. Even then, drawing in PowerPoint was a fast and efficient method for quickly prototyping and communicating software user interface designs.

Since then, PowerPoint prototypes have become a standard within Microsoft. The interactivity that Kris writes about and shows in the video is a great way of going beyond "paper prototypes" as it lets you put a novice in front of the computer to "try out" software that hasn't actually been written yet; a practice that helps avoid design mistakes and saves development time and money!

From what we hear the Visual Studios team was very happy to have had Kris join them this summer, and the PowerPoint team congratulates him on his enthusiasm and technique!

Make sure to check out Kris Jordan's blog.

Ric Bretschneider
9-14-2008