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

Features

Designed to help you get a point across with images, PowerPoint 2007 makes some useful adjustments. Drop-down menus of styles, WordArt and slide animations let you roll your mouse over them to preview a change on the page before you finalize it. You won't need a design degree to create a good-looking slide show. The colour themes are more attractive overall than in PowerPoint 2003, and once you pick one, your theme will apply to the other preview galleries. There are loads of new document templates, many of which you can find at Microsoft's Web site, and you can customise your own. Next to the more elegant-looking styles from PowerPoint 2007, slide shows made in PowerPoint 2003 might look pretty flat.

However, some newcomers to 2007 may find it tricky to grasp the ever-changing galleries, which can be clumsy to work with. For example, you must precisely arrange your view of a page when applying styles to prevent the drop-down menu from obscuring the changes. Sometimes we couldn't benefit from the live previews because a small picture on the page was hidden by its connected style gallery. We found SmartArt less than intuitive to use. This feature lets you create attractive flowcharts, pyramids and other diagrams, but when we selected bulleted text to convert to SmartArt, the big button on the Insert tab didn't do the trick. The correct conversion button was a tiny item beneath the Home tab (you can also right-click the mouse).

Drop-down galleries let you preview animations and other style changes on the page before you make up your mind.

PowerPoint offers new options for safely sharing slide shows, which should be handy if your presentation is under a nondisclosure agreement. The Prepare options beneath the Office button let you edit metadata and remove potentially embarrassing changes. When you choose Inspect Document, Document Properties will appear below the Ribbon toolbar so you can change the author name, comments and more. The Review tab helpfully clusters commenting and spellchecking. Unfortunately, Microsoft hasn't created a way to instantly upload a presentation so you can take it on the road and access it from an online account. For that, you'll need Microsoft Groove or SharePoint server tools. You could also install a free add-in from the third-party, such as Zoho's Web-based presentations software. Zoho's application, however, remains in a rough state and lacks a lot of PowerPoint's functionality.

However, there's not much new in the way of managing multimedia files. When we clicked away from the audio icon, we had a hard time later finding the sound to edit it. An audio icon appears within the centre-pane view of a slide, but it's hard to see within the thumbnails when you're scrolling through the pages. Nor are there tie-ins to Microsoft's Web-based products, such as MSN Soapbox Video, to let you make dynamic presentations that integrate online content.

Microsoft's new, default Open XML file formats could be a pain if you send and receive presentations with users who might be running older software. The new file extension for PowerPoint 2007 is PPTX. People with PowerPoint 2000 and 2003 can only open PPTX files after they install a converter. If you use PowerPoint 2007 to save a backward-compatible, PPT file, all the dynamic images and styles will flatten. Once you convert a PPT document back to PPTX, that flattened content should return to its original state. Our guide to Office 2007's file compatibility explains more.

Document Properties options let you edit the names of authors and editors as well as their comments so you can wipe the slate clean before sending a presentation to a client.

Luckily, PowerPoint integrates better than ever with other Office 2007 applications. It's great that you can preview presentations from emails within Outlook 2007, for instance. And you can embed an Excel chart within a presentation and see the chart change while you edit the data in Excel in a different window.

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