PowerPoint 2007 RTM
Published: 29 Nov 2006
Whether you're creating a digital slide show to teach students, train employees or publicise products, PowerPoint is the most popular presentation-making software. With this update, Microsoft hopes that PowerPoint 2007's drastically different interface will make it easier to find common tools. In our tests, we encountered a steep learning curve adjusting to the ambitious new design. In addition to relearning the menus and buttons, you'll also have to take extra steps to make sure that people working with older versions of PowerPoint will be able to open the XML-based, 2007 files (see our video about Office 2007 file compatibility for details).
The Office 2007 RTM software we've been testing is the same code that will come bundled on computers from vendors with Microsoft partnerships. See our preview of Microsoft's new office suite.
It took us about 10 minutes to install Office 2007 RTM Enterprise on a Windows XP computer, and the process was smooth in our tests. Once PowerPoint 2007 is running, you'll notice that File, Edit and other old menus have disappeared from the top of the screen. In their place is a thick Ribbon toolbar that organises colourful icons and menus within tabs: Home, Insert, Design, Animations, Slide Show, Review, View and Add-Ins. These tabs are meant to display only the tools you might need to use at a given moment. Therefore, a Drawing Tools Format tab appears only when you click an image, and a Chart Tools tab emerges if you select an Excel chart within the PowerPoint slide. The shape-shifting layout of PowerPoint and companion Office 2007 software will probably frustrate new users accustomed to the former ways of Office software.
At the same time, power users should appreciate that pressing Alt on the keyboard pops up badges representing keyboard shortcuts. And the Ribbon arrangement makes certain features easier to find than in the past. For instance, the Insert tab offers quick, graphical buttons for popping a table, a picture, a movie or a SmartArt diagram into a slide. The View tab lets you hop among the various slide show layouts, such as Normal and Handout Master. If you want to preview the appearance of a slide transition, the Animations tab has a drop-down gallery of fades, wipes and other effects that you can see before making the change to your document. Similarly, dynamic galleries of fonts from the Home tab and bright layout themes from the Design tab are welcome time-saving additions to PowerPoint.
Sometimes, these options are intelligent; for instance, the Background Styles menu offers slide backgrounds that match the range of colours already used in your document. Although such galleries can be useful, we're not ardent fans of the pre-programmed designs and would prefer the ability to easily tweak styles on our own. With some extra effort, you can add your own styles to a gallery. And those who tend to use clip art will probably find the galleries convenient — that is, if they're not bewildered when their document looks different when they roll the mouse over styles.
Yet despite the touted focus on ease of use within Office 2007, we fumbled with features that we'd hoped to be more intuitive. For example, we couldn't highlight a bulleted list of text and convert it right away to a SmartArt diagram, such as a flow chart. Instead, we had to reselect and copy the text, and then create a SmartArt chart and paste the text into it.
On a brighter note, we like PowerPoint's integration with other Office apps. If you choose Chart from the Insert tab, Excel will open in a split-screen view with PowerPoint. The chart in PowerPoint will reflect any changes you make to its source data in Excel. And Outlook 2007 also lets you view PowerPoint files attached to emails with fewer steps than in the past.
If you're sending PowerPoint files to third parties or taking them on the road, the Review tab clusters options for protecting your work with digital signatures and passwords. You can find more security functions from the Prepare menu when you click the Microsoft Office button in the upper-left corner. Because PowerPoint presentations are meant to be shared, the new file formats within Office 2007 have special relevance to users of PowerPoint, old and new. As Microsoft has rebuilt Office software from the ground up, it created XML-based files that squeeze more data into less hard drive space. By default, when you select Save in PowerPoint 2007, your work will be in the new, XML-based file format.
Microsoft has taken steps to allow users of old and new editions of PowerPoint to share each other's work, but there are some roadblocks. If you send a PowerPoint 2007 file to a user of PowerPoint 2003, they'll have to download a Compatibility Pack and reboot their system before they can open your work (see our video). Imagine the potential nightmare at a podium if you're ready to deliver a speech but need to jump through these hoops. Therefore, if you need to send PowerPoint 2007 files to colleagues and clients — or especially if you plan to display a slide show on someone else's computer — then it wouldn't be a bad idea to save two versions of your work: one in the new, PPTX format and another with the PPT extension from older versions PowerPoint.
PowerPoint documents are supposed to appear the same when you show a presentation, no matter which format they're saved in. However, some features from the new PowerPoint won't work if they're saved as a backward-compatible PPT file. One example: you can link from any page to any other page within a PowerPoint 2007 PPTX file, but at this point, those links won't work if the slide show is saved as a PPT. Luckily, if you convert that same PPT file back to the PPTX version, the original elements from PowerPoint 2007 should return to life.
Users of PowerPoint 2007 will be able to choose from among a wealth of Web-based service options. Flash-based tutorials walk you through finding where features have moved from Office 2003. Final details on paid support are not yet available.
If you currently have a hard time locating basic features within PowerPoint 2003 or earlier, the 2007 layout might ease the process of inserting graphics and multimedia elements, as well as for finalising documents. But unlike our delight with Excel 2007's many number-crunching shortcuts, we didn't experience any 'aha' moments with the RTM version of PowerPoint 2007 that made an upgrade from older versions of this presentation-maker seem especially vital. We wish, for instance, that any PowerPoint user could post a slide show to the Web and show it off to anybody. Various online slide-show applications will let you do that for free, but the presentations they make are pretty basic. We'll continue to dig into the new PowerPoint software and will provide rated reviews when the retail edition is available early in 2007. Until then, you can test-drive the beta edition of PowerPoint 2007 for free by downloading Office 2007 at office.microsoft.com.
- Microsoft Office Standard 2007
- Word 2007
- Excel 2007 RTM
- PowerPoint 2007
- Outlook 2007
- Inside Office 2007's files
- Office 2007's new file formats
- Inside Word 2007 RTM
- Inside Excel 2007 RTM
- Inside PowerPoint 2007 RTM
- Microsoft Office: Then and Now
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