The Beta Undercover Reporter explores PowerPoint 2007
The phrase ‘death by PowerPoint’ has long been part of business parlance, and is testament to the popularity of the software. Yes, many a boring presentation has been made even more tedious by a seemingly endless stream of unimaginative slides. However the fact remains that, in the right hands, Microsoft Office PowerPoint can be invaluable in getting your point across in an effective and professional manner, and there is much that the new version has to offer that will make your job easier.
In common with other applications in the 2007 Microsoft Office system, PowerPoint 2007 boasts the new task-based ribbon control. Open up the application, for example, and you are presented with the template for a typical title slide and an invitation to ‘Click to add title’. Once you’ve done that, drop down the Quick Styles palette to reveal a host of styles ready for you to apply to your title text. Furthermore, you can preview each one simply by running your mouse pointer across the selection. It’s different from what you might be used to but you will soon be wondering how you managed without it.
Creating consistent designs
PowerPoint 2007 joins Word 2007 and Excel 2007 in helping you ensure a consistent and professional design across all your documents. Switch to the Design ribbon and you will see that it is dominated by a selection of pre-designed Themes. Once again, you can run your mouse pointer across the selection to see how each one looks when applied to your current slide. What’s more, you can further customise each Theme by selecting new Theme Colour schemes, Background Styles, Fonts and Effects.
Once you’ve made your selection it will be maintained across new slides as you add them to your presentation. Furthermore, alter any aspect of your selected theme and your change will be reflected across your presentation, including not only slide text and backgrounds, but colours and effects used within charts and diagrams.
PowerPoint 2007 comes with nine slide layouts, ranging from a Blank slide to a Comparison slide that puts two areas of content side by side, each with their own heading. New to this version is the ability to create Custom Slide Layouts that can be saved as templates for use in future presentations.
Pretty as a picture
As with Word 2007 and Excel 2007, PowerPoint 2007 benefits from the new SmartArt and charting graphics engine. A useful feature on the charting side is the ability to ‘Save As Template’, which again helps maintain consistency. However it is SmartArt that deservedly gets the attention with this release, bringing with it a new set of tools that enable you to create a wide range of diagrams with the same ease as charts and graphs. Furthermore you can use these diagrams not only in your presentations, but also in your documents and spreadsheets.
Insert a SmartArt graphic and you are presented with well over 100 templates, divided into seven categories (List, Process, Cycle, Hierarchy, Relationship, Matrix and Pyramid). Select one of these and the diagram appears in your slide, together with a window in which you type the text you want to see in each element of the diagram. Particularly handy is the way the text is automatically sized to fit the element. You can then select a colour scheme from the palette of Theme colours, and add further effects to give a truly professional finish.
This is a powerful tool, and yes, you can produce a truly garish mess should you wish. That said, the tool does all it can to help you produce compelling images that are consistent with the appearance of not only the current slide, but all the documents produced by your organisation.
Sharing your work
One of the common themes that we have seen throughout this series on the 2007 Microsoft Office system has been collaboration, and PowerPoint 2007 is no different. The principle innovation here is the Slide Library which gives you a repository for slides that can be re-used by anyone in your organisation.
Slide Libraries are stored within SharePoint Server 2007 which can also be used to manage your slide presentations, giving you access to workflow facilities such as version and access control. You can choose to keep any slide that you use from a Slide Library synchronised, so that changes to the original are automatically reflected in your presentation. If the quarterly sales data get updated on the server, for example, you can be confident that your presentations will reflect the latest figures.
There are of course many other innovations in this new release, however there is only space to mention one more here, and that must be the new Pointer Options that appear when you right-click a slide during a presentation. These allow you to annotate your slides as you talk, using either a black or red pen, or a yellow highlighter. It’s a nice touch.
This article finishes the Undercover Reporter’s test drive of the 2007 Microsoft Office system. Click here to find out what he thought of the other applications.
