PowerPoint offers new options for safely sharing slide shows, which should be handy if your presentation is under a nondisclosure agreement. The Prepare options beneath the Office button let you edit metadata and remove potentially embarrassing changes. When you choose Inspect Document, Document Properties will appear below the Ribbon toolbar so you can change the author name, comments, and more. The Review tab helpfully clusters commenting and spellchecking. Unfortunately, Microsoft hasn't created a way to instantly upload a presentation so you can take it on the road and access it from an online account. For that, you'll need Microsoft Groove or SharePoint server tools. You could also install a free add-in from the third-party, such as Zoho's Web-based presentations software. Zoho's application, however, remains in a rough state and lacks a lot of PowerPoint's functionality.
However, there's not much new in the way of managing multimedia files. When we clicked away from the audio icon, we had a hard time later finding the sound to edit it. An audio icon appears within the centre-pane view of a slide, but it's hard to see within the thumbnails when you're scrolling through the pages. Nor are there tie-ins to Microsoft's Web-based products, such as MSN Soapbox Video, to let you make dynamic presentations that integrate online content.
Microsoft's new, default Open XML file formats could be a pain if you send and receive presentations with users who might be running older software. The new file extension for PowerPoint 2007 is PPTX. People with PowerPoint 2000 and 2003 can only open PPTX files after they install a converter. If you use PowerPoint 2007 to save a backward-compatible, PPT file, all the dynamic images and styles will flatten. Once you convert a PPT document back to PPTX, that flattened content should return to its original state.
Document Properties options let you edit the names of authors and editors as well as their comments so you can wipe the slate clean before sending a presentation to a client.
Luckily, PowerPoint integrates better than ever with other Office 2007 applications. It's great that you can preview presentations from e-mails within Outlook 2007, for instance. And you can embed an Excel chart within a presentation and see the chart change while you edit the data in Excel in a different window.
Service and support
Boxed editions of Microsoft Office 2007 include a decent, 174-page Getting Started guide. During the first 90 days, you can contact tech support for free, and help at any time with any security-related or virus problems is also free. Beyond that, paid support costs a painfully high US$49 per telephone or e-mail incident. Luckily, Microsoft's online help is excellent, although we're displeased that Microsoft and other software makers are increasingly promoting do-it-yourself assistance. We especially like the PowerPoint help, which walks you through where commands have moved since Office 2003. You can also pose questions to the large community of Microsoft Office users via free support forums and chats. Microsoft Office Diagnostics tool, included with the Office 2007 suites, is also designed to detect and repair problems if something goes haywire.
Conclusion
Is PowerPoint 2007 worth the upgrade? Probably not, if you rarely use the program. Other than the new graphical styles and dynamic galleries, there's not much new here. At the same time, PowerPoint's live graphical previews, SmartArt, and easy-to-pick design templates could make the difference between a sales pitch and a sales contract for some professionals. If you don't want your older PowerPoint presentations to be overshadowed by more up-do-date-looking ones crafted by someone who has already upgraded, then the 2007 edition will be worth your while.
Microsoft PowerPoint 2007
Company: Microsoft
RRP: TBA
6%
1%
"PowerPoint is the best-known software for creating slide shows, whether they're used in a grade school history class, for a corporate sales pitch, or, in the most famous example, to warn the world about climate change."
That was actually done with Apple's Keynote program and NOT PowerPoint. Don't you guys bother to check these things?