PowerPoint 2013

You don?t need to buy all of Microsoft Office 2013 ?if you use only one of its many apps. So if you spend your days building presentations, but you don?t need a spreadsheet or a full-featured word-processor, then visit Microsoft?s online store at http://office.microsoft.com/en-us/buy, scroll down to the foot of the page, and buy a copy of PowerPoint 2013 for the weird-sounding price of $109.99. Even if you?re happy with the vastly enhanced graphic razzle-dazzle that Microsoft added to the previous version, PowerPoint 2010, you need PowerPoint 2013 because it?s the first version that?s fully at home in the twenty-first century.

The new version finally defaults to creating presentations that fill wide-screen monitors, and web-based presentations are easier to manage than ever. PowerPoint also has Office 2013?s suite-wide support for tablet computing in addition to desktops and laptops. As in the rest of Office 2013, PowerPoint?s tablet-based features are a mixed success?more about that later?but all the other new features are impressively well-executed, with the bonus that they require virtually no new learning.

Getting Help
As in the rest of Office 2013, PowerPoint?s opening screen is a spacious gallery of presentation templates, plus an icon that launches a video tour of the new version. If you don?t find a template that matches what you need, an online search box additional templates from Microsoft and other suppliers. The search box suggests categories such as ?Charts and Diagrams? or ?Medical,? but you can enter anything specific you need. For example, a search for ?Venn Diagram? produced four templates with multiple examples of the kind of diagram I wanted. All of Microsoft?s templates default to the wide-screen 16:9 format. Many third-party templates default to the traditional 4:3 format, but all templates, from any source, can a Slide Size button on the Design tab lets you switch between wide-screen and conventional format?or you can create any custom format.

Presenting, Sharing, & Comments
The biggest improvements are in PowerPoint?s Presenter View, the viewing mode that displays notes and other options on your own computer screen while your audience views only your slides. Finally, you can rehearse with Presenter View on your laptop, without an external monitor?simply press Alt-F5 to enter Presenter View. The Presenter View screen shows a small image of the next slide in addition to a large image of the current one, and a button lets you view all the slides in a presentation so that you can jump easily to any other slide. I was surprised by the slight delay before the all-slides screen appeared on one of my older Windows 7 laptops, so you may want to experiment with this feature before using it in an actual presentation. (I?ll compare PowerPoint?s Presenter View with the similar feature in Apple?s Keynote later in this review.)

One major new convenience lets you transmit a presentation online to any browser. All you need is a Microsoft account, and the presentation gets transmitted from Microsoft?s servers. PowerPoint 2013 is the only desktop- or tablet-based app that broadcasts presentations online. The only alternative is to use web-based presentation software like Google Docs or Prezi (www.prezi.com).

In Word 2013 Microsoft revamped the Comment feature that lets your co-workers exchange notes and suggestions about your document. PowerPoint 2013 now includes a comment feature that works like Word?s, complete with collapsible tree-structured comments that let you reduce a whole thread of commands to a small box. Similar improvements in the interface include a revamped animation feature that (for example) shows you a motion path by showing a normal view of the object in its starting position, plus a dotted line showing the path the object will follow, and a ghost image of the ending position. Of course, as in earlier versions, an Animation pane and preview feature lets you create and refine animations, but the new, more information display makes it faster and easier to see what you?re doing.

Source: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/ziffdavis/pcmag/~3/2CjwtnG6XcE/0,2817,2418053,00.asp

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