Ten Good Things New in PowerPoint 2010

I’ve been working with the Microsoft Office 2010 beta for a few months. Like many, I’ve been wondering, what do you do to enhance products that are already chock-full of features?

PowerPoint struck me as a tough one to add value to; I’m a regular speaker who builds very complex graphics-based slides, and PPT 2007 has worked really well. (I’m proud to say that the deck for my presentation in NYC Wednesday contains only a single slide with bullet points, a list of takeaways on the final slide.) Still, they’ve added a number of things that make it a “must” upgrade for me.

Perhaps surprisingly, there are also a few items that enhance it for relatively inexperienced users who just want to make their presentations a bit better.

So here are ten high-value items new to PowerPoint 2010:

1. Embedded video. Now, when you put video into your presentation and then move it to another machine, the video moves with it.
2. Fine-grained control over complex animations. Most PPT animations are not worth the bits they’re printed on, but if used well they can really clarify a point. Now you can make motion-type animations, such as moving an object along a path, a lot smoother. This is pretty nitpicky stuff… unless you really sweat over your presentations, which I do. I hate stuff that breaks the illusion and calls attention to the presentation itself, and this new feature lets me avoid some “corners” that I never felt comfortable with.
3. Save presentation as video. Use your presentation to create an actual playback video. You can even add narrations and timings.
4. Create sections of files, akin to headings in a Word doc. Now in a long PPT, you can find the individual parts easily. This feature is especially useful when people collaborate on a presentation. Given that PPT is often used in business for creating reports, businesses will find it a lot easier to pull these together from multiple people. (Is PPT the best way to present this info? That’s a different question. Nevertheless, like bullet points, this is a common usage, and PPT 2010 has improved the experience.)
5. Include video from YouTube or other online sites. Now you can include YACV (yet another cats video) in your presentation… or even some useful content. You do need a live Internet link to run the video — which makes sense in terms of copyright.
6. Place titles and other objects on top of video. Video used to run on top of everything else. Now you can add titles, pointers and arrows, and other objects in the standard bring-forward/send-backward manner. (You can also put the video in a non-rectangular frame.)
7. Video controls — brightness, contrast, recoloring — akin to what you can do with pictures.
8. Remove background from a picture. It’s not perfect, but it works well enough for most people on many pictures. For years, I’ve been doing this by the very complex method of drawing a closed Bezier curve around the object (that’s the tool that looks like a square with some rounded chunks taken out, called “freeform”); clicking Edit Points to adjust the curves to fit the object better; copy (Ctrl+C) the picture; right click the outline you drew and select Format Shape; select Picture Fill and Fill from Clipboard; trim as needed with the Offset controls. I still have to do that on complex pictures, but I’ve found I can nail about half of them using the new Remove Background feature, a huge timesaver. (Wednesday’s presentation has about 25 pictures from which I’ve cut out the background, from a watch replacing the head on a $500 bill — hourly billing! — to a stamp that says “Done” to a plate with a pretzel. You’ve got to come to the seminar if you want to know how a plate with a pretzel illustrates the concept of managing scope.)
9. Better cropping tool, which “ghosts” the cropped part of the image as you work, so you can see what you’re cutting out as well as what you’re leaving in.
10. Trim and fade video and audio. No longer do you need a separate editor to cut the end off a video, or fade it in or out.

There are 50 or more new features that add value.

As always, few people other than professional designers will use every feature. However, each user works with a different feature set; that’s why there are so many features in these kinds of programs. The trick is to (a) find the features that make sense for what you’re doing and (b) when you think, “I wish I could do that,” it’s ever more likely that you can do that.

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I took part in some ask-the-customer design sessions for Office 2007. Two things struck me that many critics don’t think about, because they don’t play well with the whole bash-Microsoft shtick. (There are lots of legitimate things to get on Microsoft’s case about, but there are many things the company does very well.)

The context is that we had about 15-20 law-firm CIOs and tech leaders in a room; they were asked about what they wanted to see in the next version, then called “Office 12.”

First, there were innumerable conversations like this:

Customer #1: I wish Word would do X in the next version.

Customer #2: It already does it. (Note — it was almost always another customer replying before someone on the Office team could say anything!)

These kinds of conversations sparked the Ribbon. What good are all these powerful features if people don’t know they’re available?

Second, it became clear from those conversations pretty much every feature in Office had fans that considered it essential, detractors who thought it was bloat or unneeded, and others who didn’t know it existed. (Note: Clippy was long gone from Office by this time.) All of those features do have their uses, because people do radically different things with the products. I know people who build reports in PPT, do complex slides, use it as a note-taking tool, even put together videos. All use different features.