Full Review: Microsoft PowerPoint 2002
By Lori Grunin ZDNet Reviews
Of all the apps in Office XP, PowerPoint 2002 most leaves us with mixed feelings. On one hand, it incorporate several significant new features and enhancements, such as support for multiple master layouts, antialiased text, and a presenter-specific view; on the other, these are all capabilities that existed in PowerPoint's competitors before Microsoft took over the presentation graphics market.
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It may seem a small thing, but antialiasing of text on-screen makes a real difference giving presentations a professional look. And the ability to store multiple masters within a presentation template or document is a big plus for people who need to create slightly varied versions of presentations or corporate users who tend to integrate multiple presentation sources together.
If you give presentations to large groups--and have a two-monitor A/V setup--you'll like the new Presenter Tools, which provide the presenter with a different view of the presentation than the audience. As with many of the other Office XP apps, PowerPoint has surfaced various tool sets--animation, colour, design, and layout--in the new Task Pane. This metaphor seems to work best for PowerPoint, where so much of the work you do is design-based, and the Task Panes provide a convenient modeless working environment. Microsoft has also boosted PowerPoint's animation power by adding support for multiple-object animation and path animation. Overall, we like the way the Custom Animation Pane works, though its odd timeline implementation takes some getting used to.
The Auto correct options Smart Tag comes probably comes most handy in PowerPoint as well, because adding elements to a slide can change accidentally change the entire slide layout; now you can easily undo unwanted corrections.
Some new capabilities are long overdue. It's almost embarrassing that PowerPoint has until now lacked Print Preview, multiple object selection, image rotation, and a design grid.
PowerPoint also benefits from the revised collaboration tools and crash recovery tools throughout Office XP, though you still won't find any error messages that tell you why a particular template keeps crashing the app. And PowerPoint users are most likely to benefit from the new diagram object type introduced with Office XP (described in our review of Excel 2002.)
Most users won't even notice many of these changes in PowerPoint 2002. But by adding antialiasing and plugging some obvious holes in the program's features, Microsoft has made the top presentation graphics program even better.
