PowerPoint 12 (beta 1)

Happily for presentation creators who are tired of the look and feel of earlier versions of PowerPoint, version 12 spices up its graphics with more depth and shading and offers a range of new colours, templates, libraries and fonts. PowerPoint 12 can save custom layouts -- helpful if you want, say, your company's trademark orange-and-grey colour scheme to appear across multiple files. PowerPoint 12 makes previews live as you mouse through the selections in galleries. As with Word 12, you'll be able to highlight a chunk of text in PowerPoint and instantly convert it to a chart or a diagram.

As with Word and Excel within Office 12, people who upgrade from earlier versions are likely to face an uphill battle getting used to the major interface overhaul. And although PowerPoint 12 (beta 1) provides various new choices for decorating slide shows, it misses the opportunity to improve in other areas. Splashy new graphics aside, we don't notice any better ways to integrate multimedia content, such as music or videos, into PowerPoint files. Nor does this update offer better time-tracking or other tools to help you manage your presentations in real time.

As PowerPoint 12 moves through the early stages of beta testing, we wonder whether the initial shock of relearning where to find functions of PowerPoint 12 (beta 1) will wear off and be replaced by the greater efficiency Microsoft is touting. Yet among all of the programs within Microsoft Office 12, the new image galleries and templates seem most relevant to the image-conscious PowerPoint. Our image gallery offers you more images of PowerPoint 12's new look and feel.