Microsoft PowerPoint 2010 offers great deal of features related to images and videos which were otherwise available only in adobe Photoshop or Adobe premium. You can edit the videos and define the start and end of the video file, recolor the video, add special effects, give a shape to video and can set triggers on video timeline.
Recolor a Video inserted in slide
Just like an image, videos inserted in PowerPoint slides can have different shapes, color and effects. By using these advance effects you can show the video in oval shape or can apply a transparent green layer, set the video border to be grey and much more. See video below to learn more about recoloring a video:
A recolored video:
Add special effects to videos inserted
Effects like shadow, relection, glow can also be applied to videos inserted. Just double click the video and select the desired effect from the video tools under video effects drop down.
There are situations in organisations when more than one person has to work on same presentation. Company CEO or VP sales might have to add details to their respective slides for an upcoming meeting with stakeholders. In such scenario two version of same presentation get created; one having the information added by CEO and other version having details added by VP sales. Now if you are the one who has the responsibility to create the final version out of these two PowerPoint files, it might take too much of your time to manually figure out the new information added or other changes done to different slides and chances are that you end up creating a presentation having either critical sales information missing or a major typo included which was corrected by CEO in his version of PowerPoint file.
Microsoft PowerPoint 2010 comes in handy in such situations. PowerPoint 2010 has a nifty 'Compare and merge' feature which lets you compare two versions of same PowerPoint file and let you accept or reject the changes.
Here are steps to compare and merge two versions of a PowerPoint file:
1) Open the first version of PowerPoint file
2) Click on Review tab on Ribbon
3)Click on Compare
4)Open the version 2 of PowerPoint file
You will see a 'Revisions' pane on right side which will display the text changes and any slide additions done to the presentation.
While moving across the slides, you can accept or reject text or slide changes and create a final updated presentation.
Here is a nice video from Microsoft explaining "Compare and merge" feature:
Microsoft PowerPoint 2010 has quite rich picture tools. If used effectively, it's none less than a professional image editing software like Photo-shop. Apart from regular features of image editing like cropping, adjustment of brightness, picture effects, PowerPoint 2010 also offers some advance features like Artistic effects, Background removal and picture layouts.
Artistic effects
With PowerPoint 2010, you can apply different artistic effects to your pictures to make them look more like a sketch, drawing, or painting so that they blend well with the theme of your presentation. Some of the new effects include Pencil Sketch, Line Drawing, Chalk Sketch, Watercolor Sponge, Mosiac Bubbles, Glass, Cement, Pastels Smooth, Plastic Wrap,
Glow Edges, Photocopy, and Paint Strokes. Select an image and click Artistic effects button on Pictures Tool menu. Just move the mouse over the effects and click when you find one fit for your presentation.
Background removal
PowerPoint 2010 also offers a cool new 'Background removal tool' which makes image editing quite a fun. As per Microsoft "Unlike similar tools, the Office Background Removal tool doesn’t just select color ranges or trim to a border you draw. Read more>>
Picture layout
Love creating storyboards or comic series in a PowerPoint? If your answer
is yes then Picture Layout is the perfect tool for you.
There are different type of SmartArt graphics layout where you can tell your story with pictures. There are also other new SmartArt graphic layouts. Even better, if you have pictures on your slide you can quickly convert them to a SmartArt graphic, just like you can do with text.
Using this layout to create a SmartArt graphic is simple:
Insert the SmartArt graphic picture layout.
Add your photograph(s).
Write descriptive text.
Try out image editing capabilities of PowerPoint 2010 and you will find that you no more need to leave PowerPoint to get that perfect picture.
After Robert Gaskins conceived the idea of PowerPoint in 90's, there is no looking back for PowerPoint software. As of today, Microsoft PowerPoint is one of the most popular presentation tool with more than 500 million users worldwide. Microsoft PowerPoint has an estimated 95% share of the presentation market.
The first version of PowerPoint was created only for MAC users which later got more popular among PC users as compared to MAC. Since then Microsoft has been continuously adding new features every now and then. Latest game changing offering from Microsoft is PowerPoint 2010. PowerPoint 2010 came loaded with features like PowerPoint to video, advanced image editing, co-authoring, broadcasting and web apps to name a few.
Now it's the turn of MAC users. Microsoft will be releasing PowerPoint 2011 for MAC by the year end. PowerPoint 2011 too has lots of new features like co-authoring, web apps and cool new MAC Ribbon.
Here are few videos which will give you more insight into PowerPoint 2011 for MAC.
Software upgrade always involves a learning curve and many a times we don't upgrade to latest version of operating system or software package just because of this learning curve.
There are users who are still using PowerPoint 2003 or XP and have no plans to upgrade to PowerPoint 2010. Here are few links to tutorials which will help you learn PowerPoint 2010 and make your decision to upgrade.
If you've ever inserted videos in your PowerPoint, you must have felt the pain when your friends or audience reported that video didn't play in the slide show you shared on email. Those who are well versed with PowerPoint know that video files are always linked. This means that PowerPoint always play the video file from the path it was lying when it was inserted. Smart PowerPoint users have been following the practice of keeping the PowerPoint file and videos in a common folder, zip it and share the zip file on email. This way the video inserted always refer to the path of the folder.
Lately, PowerPoint users have started using online PowerPoint sharing websites to share their presentations. Tools like authorSTREAM Desktop, which automatically ship video/audio along with PowerPoint file to their servers make sure that the online version of PowerPoint (Flash output) plays the video and audio. However, original PPT if downloaded, still fails to play the video inserted.
PowerPoint users have always longed for video embedding feature, similar to audio embedding. Finally, Microsoft has fixed the video insertion issue in PowerPoint 2010. With PowerPoint 2010, you need not to worry about the video file path or annoying "Cannot find the specified file.." errors at audience end.
Embed video files in PowerPoint 2010
In PowerPoint 2010, videos inserted from hard-disk are embedded directly into the presentation unless you deliberately choose to link. You just need to insert videos and forget about the rest. PowerPoint 2010 has also got some nifty features of optimizing and editing videos inserted.
Compatibility and Optimization of the file size
As the video files are contained in PowerPoint itself so PowerPoint size can be a major issue when it comes to sharing on the web. Also the non availability of video codec at audience end can be an issue. Optimize Media Compatibility feature of PowerPoint 2010 and Compress Media button takes care of codec and file size issues. Click optimize media compatibility on the backstage to get rid of codec issues. The compress media button available on backstage compresses the media file(s) thus reducing the total size of the PowerPoint file.
Video editing in PowerPoint 2010
PowerPoint 2010 provides many ways and means to edit the video. You can recolor videos, change brightness and contrast, set the bookmarks, change the shape and design of the video inserted. You can also trim unwanted portions of a video which you don't want to show up in the slide show.
Simply insert a video, and select the “Trim Video” option on the Playback tab. Set the “Start Time” and “End Time” either from the time-line or enter the values in respective text boxes. Trimming helps you crop unwanted stuff from the video.
Trim video
So now no more zip folders, no more video file missing errors. No matter how you insert, what's the file size, what video codec you used, with PowerPoint 2010, your videos are gonna play everywhere for sure.
PowerPoint 2010 also lets you insert Flash embeds of video sharing websites like YouTube, Vimeo. Such embeds just store the reference of path and player they are hosted on and require Internet connection to play during sideshow.
PowerPoint 2010 offers editing options both for video as well as images. With images, quite common editing is removing the background or getting a small piece of a big picture suitable for your slide. Till now Adobe Photoshop is the widely used software for removing the background or other image editing related stuff.
Remove the background from an image in PowerPoint 2010
PowerPoint 2010 offers a cool new 'Background removal tool' which will make image editing quite a fun. As per Microsoft "Unlike similar tools, the Office Background Removal tool doesn’t just select color ranges or trim to a border you draw. Background Removal uses new capabilities and algorithms from the Microsoft Research in Cambridge, UK to achieve better results automatically with very little effort or fine tuning from the user."
The new Remove Background tool as claimed by Microsoft is intelligent enough to identify background and forground thus making the task of background removal easy. You just need to select the area(marquee selection area ) of the picture which you want to keep or use on the slide. For refinemnet you can mark the areas you want to keep or remove manually.
You can find more information about image editing in PowerPoint 2010 on Microsoft blog.
You must have used format painter at times to copy settings such as font, color, and size to apply it on some other text. Format painter feature not only saves our time but also ensures that all the text in a presentation has same font, color and size.
PowerPoint users were always in need of something like format painter to transfer animation effects from one object to another. "Animation Painter" in PowerPoint 2010 lets you transfer all the animations and settings to another object thus saving your time to replicate the animation effects. It works similarly to the Format Painter. Like video triggers, 3D slideshows and PowerPoint to video, Animation Painter is a brand new feature which isn't available in PowerPoint versions prior to 2010. Just select an object with animations, select the “Animation Painter” button on the Animations tab, and with a single click you can transfer all the animations and settings to another object. Double-click on painter button will let you paint multiple objects sequentially. PowerPoint creation is gonna whole lot easy with PowerPoint 2010.
PowerPoint executes all the animations as sequence of events. Any object (text/image/shape) can be made appear, fly in as a result of click or after effect of some action. Any action for example a click results in next animation or slide.
You can't just jump on to a particular event of your choice or repeat an action again and again. For example what if you want to stay on same slide and display an image again and again on click on a text say "Who is founder of Microsoft". In such scenarios where you have to bypass sequencing or repeat actions while staying on the same slide, PowerPoint triggers is the best option available. Triggers can only be set on some animation effect.
Select any text/object, apply some custom animation effect.
Either double click or right click the animation effect applied(on custom animation sidebar).
Click on 'timings' tab, click Triggers button and select the radio button "Start effect on click of".
Select the event on whose click you want selected animation to execute.
Either visit Microsoft 's website or watch video below to understand use of triggers in PowerPoint.
Video triggers in PowerPoint 2010
PowerPoint 2010 offers Video Triggers; a feature with which one can mark locations in a video (i.e. set bookmarks), and then trigger animation sequences upon reaching those bookmarks on playback of the video. In simple terms you can set some specific animation to run when a particular scene appears in video inserted in PowerPoint.
These PowerPoint meeting web applications allow presenters to deliver presentations, live over the Internet where slide navigation is being controlled by presenter. In today’s world, many a times we need to communicate with people at different Geo locations who can’t get together at same place. That is where these presentation meeting applications come in handy.
Microsoft PowerPoint 2010 has also come up with a similar feature called broadcasting where presenter can click through the slides and everyone attending will be on the same slide. Animations also work the same way as in PowerPoint file. Only thing seems missing is chat which Microsoft must have planned with Microsoft communication server.
Here is a video demo of broadcast feature from Microsoft.
Microsoft is all set to change the way you use animation effects in PowerPoint slides. Everything in 2010 slide show (text, shapes, animations, and more) is rendered in full 3D using your machine’s graphics card. This was announced by Microsoft PowerPoint team on their blog.
PowerPoint's graphics engine is completely rebuilt using DirectX and will offer:
· Fully hardware-accelerated rendering engine
· New transition effects and an updated user interface
· Revamped animation effects and a brand new UI (timelines!)
· Animation Painter (copy your animations between objects)
· Choreograph animations with multimedia
Here is one video showing 3D capabilities of PowerPoint 2010
Microsoft PowerPoint 2010 offers great support for videos. Besides letting you insert video files, PowerPoint 2010 has in built facility to let you insert embeds of video sharing websites. Also, with PowerPoint 2010 you will be able convert PowerPoint files in WMV format video files.
Embed videos in PowerPoint 2010
You need not to go go through complex steps of adding shockwave flash object. Just copy video embed from some video sharing website(say YouTube) and click video option provided under insert tab in PowerPoint 2010. Select " Insert video from online video site", paste embed and click insert.
Besides video embeds you can also use some other flash embeds; just try embeds of PowerPoint sharing websites and those embeds will play just like they play on some blog or website.
Convert PowerPoint to video
Video has become one of the most powerful content formats lately. Video content provides you wide range of audience. In today's scenario, if you have to convert your PowerPoint to video, either you have to purchase some PowerPoint to video software or use some online PowerPoint to video website. This all is going to change to some extent with PowerPoint 2010.
PowerPoint 2010 will let you convert your PowerPoint presentations with timings(rehearsed or narrated) in WMV video format. PowerPoint 2010 even converts PowerPoint presentations without timing. You just need to select "Time to spend on each slide". If some slides are having animation effects then total duration of those slides in video will be sum total of animation timings.
With three main objectives of 'Work anywhere with Office Web applications', 'Collaborate better with co-authoring' and 'Bring ideas to life with video and picture editing', Microsoft is all set to launch office 2010 next year.
Microsoft office along with Microsoft SharePoint 2010/ Windows Live account and Office Communicator 2007 R2 and Office Communications Server 2007 R2 will be a great tool offering almost all features being offered by online presentation creation websites. Google presentations seems to stand nowhere against PowerPoint 2010. Can PowerPoint 2010 be a threat to online presentation creation websites? Though the question makes some sense yet it will be too early to look for an answer.
As per Microsoft
Microsoft PowerPoint 2010 delivers more new and exciting ways to create and share dynamic presentations with any audience. Improved audio and visual capabilities help you tell a crisp, cinematic story that’s as easy to create as it is powerful to watch. New, easy-to-use tools help you polish your presentations to help you keep your audience’s attention even longer. Almost-anywhere access to PowerPoint 2010 from your Smartphone or the Web allows you to simultaneously work on presentations with other people. Simply put, it’s never been easier to express your ideas with PowerPoint 2010. Its Backstage view replaces the file menu, a co-authoring capability streamlines collaboration, and the ability to broadcast slideshows doesn't require viewers to have PowerPoint installed.
Embedding video in PowerPoint
With PowerPoint 2010, you can effectively engage your audience by embedding and personalizing videos within your presentation. The embedded video file can be customized by adding video triggers and styles directly within PowerPoint 2010 using inbuilt basic video edit tool, saving your time and money. You can also save your PowerPoint files in wmv, compress them and share.
Awesome visual effects
PowerPoint 2010 has new Smart art graphics, more animation effects, and advance transition effects. With PowerPoint 2010, you can easily create powerful visuals and apply professional-looking designs to photos and text, and to videos in PowerPoint. From new and improved picture-editing effects such as saturation and watercolor to video editing and formatting capabilities such as trimming, fades and reflections, Office 2010 opens up a world of design options to give life to your ideas.
Here are few videos demonstrating features and capabilities of PowerPoint 2010:
