I think the biggest problem with PowerPoint is that it’s so easy to get started. I meet lots of people who think they’re experts in it. After all, all you need to do is turn it on and type away, right? Wrong.
With a little planning and a little instruction you can save time and look like a professional. Throw in an upgrade to PowerPoint 2010, and the world is your presentation oyster.
If you’ve recently upgraded, here are some of my favourite new features in PowerPoint 2010.
1. Animation painter: You can now copy a sequence of animations you’ve built to a new object. This function saves me hours.
2. Smart guides: These dotted lines look like whiskers for your images, and appear when you’re dragging objects around on the slide to align them. They pop up when you’re aligned to the top, middle or bottom of another image.
3. New visual ‘artistic effects’: A fantastic range of visual artistic effects can now be added to photographs within PowerPoint 2010. Wonderful if you’re not a PhotoShop whizz.
4. Remove background: A great feature for taking out the background of logos and pictures, this easy masking tool means you can work directly in PowerPoint to edit your image.
5. Embedded video: Broken links and media files have caused problems in PowerPoint for years. The video would work fine on your computer but then you’d send someone the presentation and they’d often be stuck looking at a black screen. Now you can embed your video or audio file into your presentation and send it on confident that the whole presentation will run – although it does increase the file size.
6. Video formatting: You can even do some simple editing of that video within PowerPoint. For example, you can trim the ends off a video or change the poster frame so your slide doesn’t start with a boring black screen.
7. Video creation: I love the new ability to save the whole presentation as a video that includes my narration, timings and animation. Perfect for sharing your presentation on YouTube.
8. Sharing presentations on the web: Publish your presentation so your audience can review or print at their leisure. Using Windows Live ID, you place the presentation in a public or private folder and send a link by email or embed a code on your blog or website.
Got questions about PowerPoint 2010? Or is there a feature you’d like to see in the next upgrade? Please comment below.
“ I love the new ability to save the whole presentation as a video that includes my narration, timings and animation. Perfect for sharing your presentation on YouTube. ”
Emma Bannister is the founder of Presentation Studio and if it can be done in PowerPoint, she knows how to do it! She runs presentation design & technical workshops to maximise PowerPoint's potential and deliver winning presentations.
