Clean, Smooth and Sexy: Could this really be PowerPoint 2013?

The word sexy is rarely, if ever, used to describe Microsoft Office products, but in the case of PowerPoint 2013 an exception will need to be made. Like an ugly duckling that became a majestic swan the latest rendition of Microsoft’s presentation software has undergone a jaw dropping transformation. The changes aren’t even just on the outside; it’s as if the duckling has even developed a better personality. With looks that can kill, a mess of new features and touch screen capability it must be just about time that we started calling this duckling what it is: PowerPoint 2013 is a swan.

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Hello and welcome back to our course on PowerPoint 2013.  In this section, I want to run through the main new features in PowerPoint 2013.  This is new in comparison with the previous version PowerPoint 2010.  Now if you haven’t used PowerPoint before, you may think that looking at the new features won’t really help you very much or mean much to you, but I think it’s still worth going through this section because it will highlight some of the main points that I’m going to be looking at and also give you an idea of the structure of PowerPoint 2013, particularly because some of the changes in it have a very general kind of impact.

Now the first thing to point out is that within Microsoft.com in the Office part of the Microsoft website there is a page, What’s new in PowerPoint 2013, begins with a video covering the main new points and then there’s a list of each of the points, a brief description of what each of them is and does.  So I suggest you take a look at that.  There are also links from that page into a couple of other useful areas.  One of them here, Make the switch to PowerPoint 2013, this is particularly for people who’ve been using earlier versions.  And then for people who are beginners, there are basic tasks for creating a PowerPoint 2013 presentation.  Now generally speaking, the materials that are available on the Microsoft site for learning PowerPoint are a little bit restricted compared to a fairly comprehensive course like the one I’m presenting here.  But they certainly give a different view on each of the topics and it’s always good to look on the Microsoft website to see what training materials or help materials they’ve got with any topic that you’re trying to find out about in relation to PowerPoint.

One of the most significant features in PowerPoint 2013 is the significant feature in virtually all of Office 2013 and that is that the interface has been redesigned to accommodate the use of touch.  So there’s very much an emphasis on making it easy to use on tablets and to look at presentations on phones and so on.  And as I mentioned earlier on I am at various points in the course going to look at how to achieve various things using a touch screen rather than a keyboard and mouse.  I’m not going to keep referring to that in this What’s New section, but it is very significant and in many ways it’s a key driving force behind Office 2013 in general.  So its importance is not to be underestimated.

So let’s look at some of the key new features other than the touch related ones and let’s start with more choices for getting started.  If you’ve used PowerPoint before, you know that there are a number ways of starting a new presentation.  You could begin with a blank one.  You could start with a presentation you made before.  You could use a template or maybe a presentation that you created before but haven’t used for some time.  Now with PowerPoint 2013 all of these options are really presented to you on one screen to make it very easy for you to get started on a new presentation, whichever approach you’re going to take to creating that presentation.  Now even if you haven’t given a PowerPoint presentation yourself, you may well have seen one being given where the presenter may be sits at a desk with a laptop or a PC and the presentation itself is shown on the monitor to the audience.  And what has been greatly improved in PowerPoint 2013 is the ability to control that presentation in a number of ways.  Just to give you one specific example, let’s suppose you’ve got some notes to go with the presentation but you don’t really want the audience to see those notes; you want to be able to read them yourself.  Well, you can show the notes on the PC or laptop that you’re using to control the presentation without them appearing on the monitor that the audience are able to see.  So there a number of new features associated with what’s called Presenter View, presentation tools we’ll call them that have been either introduced in PowerPoint 2013 or very much improved.

Now if you bought a TV recently, it will almost certainly be HD and widescreen.  If you’ve bought PC or a laptop or a monitor that will almost certainly have been widescreen as well.  Well, PowerPoint is now very much geared up to giving you the ability to work in widescreen and it’s very easy to switch between the standard 4:3 aspect ratio presentations of old and the new widescreen 16:9 aspect ratio layouts that we come to expect nowadays.

Of course, it’s not always the case nowadays that if you want to present to a group of people, you get them all together in a room and present on to a monitor or a white board.  Nowadays, it’s increasingly popular to run presentations online.  And with PowerPoint there are several ways of sharing your presentations over the web.  Some of those have been improved and a couple of new ones introduced in PowerPoint 2013 and we’re going to look at some of those online presentation options.  These enable you to present to an audience where the audience are pretty much anywhere and it gives them a very wide choice of device that they can use to follow your presentation.

The use of themes in PowerPoint has been established for a couple of versions.  If you’re familiar with older versions of PowerPoint, you may not be familiar with themes.  But really a theme gives you a consistent set of design styles, guidelines, and tools within a presentation and also between the components of Office 2013.  Well, within Office 2013 and specifically within PowerPoint 2013, you now have theme variations and you can more closely achieve your design goals using variations on your chosen theme.

It’s very often the case when you’re preparing a presentation and you have some complex graphics in it that you have to align objects.  Well, some of the improved tools, including smart guides in PowerPoint 2013 will help you to align objects and space objects accurately and quickly.

Increasingly people are using animation in their PowerPoint presentations and the animation features of PowerPoint have significantly improved in recent versions.  There’s a further improvement in PowerPoint 2013 which will help you with motion path to envisage not only where a particular object starts out but where it will finish up after it has moved along your specified path.

Another new feature of PowerPoint 2013 is the ability to choose two or more common shapes and to merge them to make a custom shape.

There’ve been a number of improvements to video and audio support.  These include the introduction of support for more multimedia formats and more high definition content, but also the inclusion of additional built in codex.  You can also play music in the background.  So you could play a song for the duration of a slideshow for example.

PowerPoint 2013 includes a new eye dropper tool that you can use for color matching.  This means you can take a sample from an object on the screen and apply that color to any shape in your presentation.

Another improved feature in PowerPoint 2013 which is pretty much now a feature across the board for Office 2013 is the ability to save your documents, your presentations to SkyDrive and to use that as a way of sharing those documents, in this case presentations, with other people.

PowerPoint 2013 also now includes a comment facility whereby you can review a PowerPoint presentation and give feedback by inserting comments at appropriate points.

And finally one part new and part improved feature of PowerPoint 2013 is the ability to work collaboratively on a presentation with your colleagues.  And one important factor here is the ability to use the online version of PowerPoint to work on a shared document that is accessed online.

So there we are.  That’s a quick sort of whistle stop tour of PowerPoint 2013.  I hope you find that useful even if you’re not very familiar with PowerPoint because hopefully it’ll point you in the direction of some of the things we’re going to be looking at on the course.  The first thing I’m going to look at and that’s what we’re going to cover in the next section is the use of touch.  Now there are some general aspects of using touch in Office 2013 that I’m going to cover first.  The specifics of using touch in PowerPoint 2013 some will be covered in the next section and some will be covered at the appropriate points during the course.  So please join me for the next section.

Simon Calder

Chris “Simon” Calder was working as a Project Manager in IT for one of Los Angeles’ most prestigious cultural institutions, LACMA.He taught himself to use Microsoft Project from a giant textbook and hated every moment of it. Online learning was in its infancy then, but he spotted an opportunity and made an online MS Project course - the rest, as they say, is history!