Office applications Toolkit

PowerPoint 2007 review

7.4

Editors' Rating

Setup & interface		8.0
Service & support		7.0
Features		7.0

Elsa Wenzel CNET

Published: 14 Feb 2007

PowerPoint is the best-known software for creating slide shows, whether they're used in a school classroom, for a corporate sales pitch or in a conference speech. As with the rest of the Office 2007 suite, the changes to PowerPoint are ambitious and drastic. The new interface rearranges every function you may have memorised, and the file formats are different. Plus, although you can hide the Ribbon by double-clicking on a tab, there's no going back to a 'classic' view of PowerPoint that better resembles 2007's predecessors.

Our installation of various Office editions on Windows XP computers took between 10 and 20 minutes, which was quicker than previous editions of Office. You'll have to be online to access some services, such as Help and How-To as well as Clip Art and document templates. Our reviews of Microsoft Office 2007 detail the installation process and the particulars of each edition.

Interface

Once PowerPoint is up and running, you'll find that each command is in a new place. The new program is more visually focused, so colourful icons describe many features. PowerPoint 2007 adopts the tabbed, top-heavy Ribbon toolbar also found in Word and Excel 2007. The File menu is gone, its commands moved beneath the Office logo in the corner. We were perplexed by the arrangement of some features on the Ribbon, mostly with features that we expected to be on the Insert tab. New Slide is on the Home tab, not on Insert, for example. Many tabs won't appear until you select an item on the page. Clicking on a picture triggers the Picture Tools formatting tab to display. The same process applies when working with images, sounds, charts, drawing tools and SmartArt. If your computer already has software installed that integrates with Office 2007, PowerPoint and other applications will display an Add-Ins tab. In our case, the Add-Ins tab showed commands from a third-party video-capture application.

SmartArt styles can create instant flowcharts from your text, once you find the conversion command.

There are some useful little tweaks as well. Right-clicking the mouse when hovering over text within a slide will display a mini formatting toolbar and drop-down menu. Right-clicking the mouse within a chart brings up editing tools specific to the chart. Power users can press the Alt key to display keyboard shortcuts. We find the strongest selling point of PowerPoint 2007 to be the dynamic galleries of images that put a variety of three-dimensional styles at your fingertips and render them live on the page before you click.

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Overview

PowerPoint 2007

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Editors rating: 7.4

Verdict

Microsoft PowerPoint 2007 makes prettier presentations, so an upgrade may be in order if your work is particularly image-focused and you don't mind relearning the application. If PowerPoint 2003 serves you well, however, it offers most of the same features, albeit with flatter-looking graphics.