When you connect to the service using your Windows Live ID and password, PowerPoint uploads the presentation and displays a link that you can e-mail to your audience. Showing your presentation remotely can also be a problem if your audience doesn’t use PowerPoint.Ī new tool in PowerPoint 2011 lets you broadcast slideshows over the Internet using Microsoft’s free PowerPoint Broadcast Service. Long distance presentationsĬollaborating on a presentation with one person is relatively easy, but it can be complicated if you’re working with a team that’s scattered around the country. Although you can duplicate the effect with custom animations in PowerPoint, it takes considerably more effort.Īnimations: To make an object move on the screen, you draw the desired path directly on the slide. For example, Magic Move, a versatile Keynote transition that moves objects as one slide replaces another, is absent from PowerPoint. PowerPoint’s dissolve transition is coarser than Keynote’s, and PowerPoint lacks equivalents to many of the stunning effects in Apple’s software. I was also frustrated to see that PowerPoint’s library of transitions, the special effects that morph one slide into the next during a presentation, still aren’t up to Keynote’s standard. That’s an unfortunate omission it’s much easier to choreograph multiple animations graphically than it is to drag them up and down in a list. But I was disappointed that, unlike PowerPoint 2010, the new Mac version doesn’t include an advanced timeline, which displays all the animations on a slide in a graphical timeline format. PowerPoint’s path animation tools exceed Keynote’s in some respects (PowerPoint’s paths are much easier to define and edit) and bring PowerPoint 2011 closer to PowerPoint 2010 for Windows. PowerPoint 2011 fills a huge gap in the previous version’s animation repertoire by adding motion paths, which let you move objects along tracks that are predefined or that you draw from scratch. Animation and transitionsĪs in PowerPoint 2008, you define the timing, duration, and order of animations by using the Custom Animation tab in the Toolbox. Annoyingly, though, you still can’t trim movies by adjusting their starting and ending points, nor can you add sounds that play across a specific set of slides. You can even choose a picture file as the movie’s poster frame, and you can pause and scrub through movies during a slideshow, a feature that was missing from PowerPoint 2008. New options let you crop, color correct, rotate, and add other effects to movies, which are now imported into presentations by default instead of being linked to. Although you can similarly arrange slides hierarchically in Keynote, only PowerPoint lets you name each group of slides. In addition to helping you keep track of objects on individual slides, PowerPoint 2011 helps you organize complex presentations by placing related slides in sections in the navigation pane. You drag the pane to move the object on it toward the front or back. As you mouse over each one, it lights up and a number indicating its position appears in the corner. In addition to conventional commands that let you move individual elements forward or backward, PowerPoint 2011 sports a clever new view that displays every object on the slide on a series of translucent sheets that appear to float on the screen. With these changes, PowerPoint’s view options are considerably more flexible than Keynote’s.Īnother interface enhancement makes it easier to work with busy slides that contain multiple overlapping objects. For users who prefer not to reach for the mouse, new keyboard shortcuts let you zoom in or out in 15 percent increments. That’s much more convenient than the toolbar’s magnification menu, which is still there. I haven’t been a fan of the Ribbon in any of the Office apps for Windows, so I was pleasantly surprised by its implementation in PowerPoint for Mac 2011-the Ribbon provides instant access to most of PowerPoint’s tools and functions without being too obtrusive.Ī handy new control lets you adjust the size of slides in the Normal and Slide Sorter views.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |