Options
Here's where you can customize the way PowerPoint looks and works, taking care of everything from slideshow options to what buttons appear in the Quick Access toolbar, to proofing options and more.
New to PowerPoint 2010 is the ability to customize the Ribbon. After you click Options, click Customize Ribbon, and you can choose what you want shown on each of the Ribbon's tabs.
IDG
The Options screen is where you can customize PowerPoint 2010 to your heart's content. (Click image to enlarge it.)
More new features in PowerPoint 2010
While Backstage is the most important new feature in PowerPoint 2010, there are several others that are well worth exploring. Here are a few of our favorites.
New multimedia tools
In a world awash in media, Microsoft has added important multimedia tools to PowerPoint 2010.
Perhaps the most useful are those that deal with video. In earlier versions of PowerPoint, when you wanted to play a video, you linked to an external video file. If the file was moved and was no longer in that location, you'd get an error message when you tried to play it. That certainly didn't enhance your ability to make a sale or influence people.
That's changed in PowerPoint 2010. While you can still embed video files hosted elsewhere if you so desire, you can also embed videos directly in the presentation itself. To do it, go to the Insert Tab, and in the Media group select Video --> Video from File, navigate to the video you want to insert, select it and click Insert.
The video will then be embedded directly in the presentation. It shows up as a static image on a slide. To play the video, just click the play button below it. Also included are controls for pausing and playing the video, jumping forward and backward, and controlling the volume.
Also new are video editing tools and tools for adding special effects to videos from inside PowerPoint, without having to use an additional program. To use them, first embed a video and then click it. A new Video Tools supertab appears above the Ribbon with two new tabs beneath it: Format and Playback.
Click the Format tab and you'll come to the video editing tools. Click the Corrections button to change contrast and brightness. Underneath the contrast and brightness choices, click Video Corrections Options and a dialog box appears with many editing options, including cropping the video, adding and customizing shadows to its edge, adding a glow and soft edges, and more.
IDG
New tools in PowerPoint 2010 let you let you edit video in myriad ways, including changing the brightness and contrast. (Click image to enlarge it.)
You can also recolor the video (for instance, giving it a light purple hue) by clicking the Format tab's Color button. The Format tab offers plenty of other ways to edit the video, including adding effects such as 3D rotation (click the Video Effects button) and changing the shape of its frame, such as rounding the corners or making it star-shaped (click the Video Shape button).
Go to the Playback tab to edit playback options, such as fading in and fading out, looping the video so it plays continually and more. Perhaps the most useful tool is the Trim Video tool, which allows you to cut footage from the beginning and end of a video.
New picture-editing tools
PowerPoint 2010 also offers new tools for performing basic image editing on a graphic or photo you're using in a presentation. These tools certainly don't rival Adobe Photoshop or even midrange image-editing software, but for basic, quick-and-dirty editing, they do the trick.
Select an image in a presentation and you'll see the Picture Tools supertab and the Format tab on the Ribbon. The tools are straightforward and self-explanatory. For changing the brightness or contrast, for example, click the Corrections button near the left end of the Format tab and you'll see thumbnails that you can hover over to see the results of changing the brightness and contrast in various pre-set ways. Simply click the one you want to apply, and it's done.
IDG
Hover over a thumbnail in any of the image editing pop-up windows to see its effect on the main image on the slide. (Click image to enlarge it.)
The Remove Background button does just what it says -- it removes the background of a photo so that you can create a silhouette. The Color button gives you options such as Recolor, which lets you tweak a photo's color in interesting ways including, for example, converting a color photo to grayscale and giving a blue-themed photo a greenish cast.
You can also add a variety of effects by clicking the Artistic Effects button. You can choose from several pre-selected options, including 3D effects and making a photograph look like an Impressionist painting. Click Artistic Effects Options at the bottom of the pop-up window and you'll get more editing choices, including cropping, adding a glow, doing color editing and more.
If you want to reduce the amount of space your presentation takes up on your hard disk or you want to shrink a picture because you're posting the file with the picture onto the Web, click the Compress Pictures button and make your selection.
New ways to share presentations
PowerPoint 2010 has two new ways to share your presentations with others remotely: You can broadcast them in real time over the Web or share them on a CD or DVD. Click the File tab and select Save & Send in the left pane to get to these options.
To share a live presentation over the Web, click Broadcast Slide Show and then click the Broadcast Slide Show button that appears. (Yes, it's redundant, but that's the way it works.) When you do this, you're connected to Microsoft's free PowerPoint Broadcast Service. (You'll need a Windows Live ID to make it work.)
IDG
With PowerPoint 2010, you can share presentaions in real time over the Web. (Click image to enlarge it.)
Click the Start Broadcast button and a link is created to the presentation; you can send that link to other people who can then click it and watch your live presentation streamed over the Internet in any Web browser. If you already use a different broadcast service, such as your company's internal SharePoint site, you can switch to that one instead by clicking the Change Broadcast Service button.
You can also turn your presentation into a video that you can distribute on CD, DVD or via the Web. To do that, go to the Backstage Save & Send screen and click Create a Video in the File Types area. You'll see options for having the video formatted optimally for different devices -- for example, computer monitors and high-definition displays, DVDs and the Internet, or on portable devices such as the Zune and smartphones.
When you've made your selections, click the Create Video button, choose a location to save the video to and click the Save button. The video will be saved in the Windows Media Video (.wmv) format and will be playable on any device that can play .wmv files. You can copy the .wmv file to a CD or DVD, send it via email, save it on the Web and so on.
If you prefer instead to distribute the presentation as a self-running CD, click Package Presentation for CD in the File Types area. Then click the Package for CD button that appears on the right, give the CD a name, click Copy to CD and follow the instructions for burning it to a CD.
Animation Painter
Another new useful tool is the Animation Painter. It's similar to the old Office standby Format Painter, which lets you copy formatting from one bit of text and apply it to another. With the Animation Painter, located in the Advanced Animation group in the middle of the Animations tab on the Ribbon, you can copy all of the animation features and settings of an object and apply it to another object, to another slide, to a group of slides and even to an entire presentation.
The Animation Painter works just like the Format Painter does with text. To use it, highlight an object that you've already animated, then click the Animation Painter button. When you move your cursor away from the object, it turns into a paintbrush. Click another object and the animation effects will be applied.
If you want to apply the animation to more than one object, a group of slides or all slides in a presentation, double-click the Animation Painter rather than single-clicking it. This puts you in "sticky mode." Once you're in sticky mode, click every object where you want to use the animation. To exit sticky mode, press the Esc key or click the Animation Painter button again.
Paste Preview
PowerPoint 2010 also includes a feature called Paste Preview that makes it much simpler to properly format text or other items when you paste them into a presentation. Depending on your source, you may be copying and pasting rich text, plain text, graphics, a mix of text and graphics, tables and so on.
With Paste Preview, when you paste anything into PowerPoint 2010, a small icon of a clipboard appears next to what you're pasting, with a downward-facing triangle next to the clipboard. If you click the triangle, you will see small thumbnails for all the paste options available to you for the specific type of content you're pasting.
IDG
Paste Preview in action.
Hover your mouse over any thumbnail, and not only will you see a description of the paste option (for example, Use Destination Theme, Keep Source Formatting, Picture, Keep Text Only and so on) off to the side, but the content that you're pasting will change to reflect that option in the main document. Click an option to paste the content in that format.
For example, let's say you're pasting cells from a spreadsheet, and you want to save those cells as a graphic. Paste the cells, click the clipboard thumbnail and select the Picture thumbnail that appears.
What's the point of all this? In previous versions of PowerPoint, you didn't get a chance to preview the results of your paste choice. With Paste Preview, you do. Make Paste Preview your friend. It sounds like a minor change, but it will save your plenty of undo and redo operations.
By the way, you can also set a default paste option. After you click the clipboard icon, click Set Default Paste. You'll then be sent to PowerPoint's Advanced Options page, where you can select your default paste option. Alternatively, you can select File --> Options --> Advanced to get to this page.
Protected View
PowerPoint 2010 introduces a new feature called Protected View, which is designed to keep your computer safe when you open PowerPoint documents sent to you via email or that you downloaded from the Web. Any time you open one of those documents, it's opened in Protected View, which essentially means that you're blocking that document from accessing your computer.
It also means, though, that you can't edit those documents or even print them -- you can only read them. When you open a document in Protected View, you'll see a notification at the top of the page where the Ribbon would normally be. (If you click a tab to show the Ribbon, the Protected View message goes away. But the document is still in Protected View.)
If you know the file is safe, click the Enable Editing button. This takes the file out of Protected View and marks it as a Trusted Document; from now on you'll be able to edit or print it.
IDG
Protected View blocks downloaded or emailed content from accessing your PC. (Click image to enlarge it.)
If Protected View annoys you, click File --> Options --> Trust Center --> Trust Center Settings. From there you can turn off Protected View altogether or customize it to a limited extent -- for example, you can turn it off for documents you receive in Outlook but leave it on for documents you download from the Web.
PowerPoint 2007 features in PowerPoint 2010
Microsoft introduced a number of useful features in PowerPoint 2007 -- including themes, custom slide layouts and SmartArt -- that users of earlier PowerPoint versions will likely want to learn about. These are still available in PowerPoint 2010, and for the most part they work just as they did in PowerPoint 2007.
One exception is saving presentations in the .ppt file format. Like PowerPoint 2007, PowerPoint 2010 defaults to saving in the .pptx format. To save presentations in the older .ppt format for compatibility with users of PowerPoint 2003 or earlier, click the File tab; then, in Backstage, choose Save As --> PowerPoint 97-2003 Document. To have PowerPoint 2010 save all of your files in the old .ppt format automatically, click the File tab and choose Options --> Save --> Save files in this format --> PowerPoint 97-2003 Document. (Reminder: Doing this will limit your options for things like themes and other features available only in the .pptx format.)
In some cases, PowerPoint 2010 improves on the features introduced in 2007. For example, PowerPoint 2007 made it easier to include music in presentations, and PowerPoint 2010, as detailed in "New multimedia tools" earlier in this story, now makes it easy to include videos.