PowerPoint 2013/2016: Formatting text boxes and bulleted lists. Aligning Text boxes - Duration: 10:33. Tom Kleen 7,129 views. Microsoft's new PowerPoint tools make your presentations way less boring. Microsoft is also planning to offer the same to Mac users with an Office Insider for Mac program launching soon. Mar 27, 2014 The PowerPoint app gives you access to the familiar tool you already know. Quickly create, edit, view, present, or share presentations quickly and easily from anywhere. Need to access your most recently used PowerPoint files quickly while on the go? Tablet, PC, and Mac.
Microsoft is on a roll with the new Office 2016 suite.
I’m impressed not just with some of the new features--in particular, the team-editing capabilities in Word 2016 that let everyone edit the same document--but with how the company is working to add new features even though the app debuted just a few weeks ago.
Just today, Microsoft announced two new features in PowerPoint 2016. Chris Maloney and Sean Villaron from Microsoft, who lead the PowerPoint 2016 program, showed me the features in a Skype demo this week and explained how they work.
First, a new Designer feature is a bit like a real-time template. You can create all of your slides the way you normally do, with a template or without. You lay out the images and text, get everything in the order you want, and even create all of the timings and transitions. Then, you pick the Designer tool. As Maloney explained, it’s like taking your slides and giving them a graphic designer who knows how improve them even more and wow an audience.
It was amazing to see how the Designer feature offered several variations. In a slideshow with some text and photos, the Designer created a new version that put the images into a frame that looked like it was hanging in an art gallery. You get five to choose from.
Another interesting aspect to the Designer is that the processing for the suggestions occurs in Microsoft Azure in the cloud, and this feature knows which designs most users pick. If none one is picking the one with the art gallery look, it won’t keep showing up. It’s the power of the crowd instilled in the app.
Another new feature called Morph reminds me of an old app called Adobe Director. (It’s still around, but I used it back when it was owned by Macromedia.) Morph lets you create animations without having to know anything about how animation works. You create some art, move it around, and Morph watches what you are doing and builds the animation.
In the demo, I saw how Villaron created some slides with planets. He moved the planets up into a row and then clicked Morph to create the animation. It’s a smart feature because it allows you to make a visual point. It’s not just intended to create some visual interest or entertain the crowd. With the planets “aligned” like that, it creates an easier way to track with the explanations. It matches with what you want to say.
The two new features will be rolled out to all PowerPoint 2016 users in the next few weeks. If you already own PowerPoint 2016 and subscribe to Office 365, you can join the Office Insider program and you’ll be able to test the new features within a week or so.
I like how Microsoft is improving Office 2016, and it’s something the company promised to do. It’s more than just fixing bugs. It matches up with the fluid nature of Web apps that sometimes change and improve on a day to day basis, yet matches with the needs of business users who prefer desktop apps. I also like how the app uses the cloud. I could see that expanding even further to make the most commonly used features easier to find.
For now, these new features work in Office 2016 for PC on Windows 10. Microsoft plans to roll out the features to additional operating systems in the coming weeks.
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Microsoft PowerPoint 2016 for Mac
As I use PowerPoint 2016 for Mac, the word that keeps popping into my head is pleasant. Nearly everything about the massive visual overhaul from the previous version (PowerPoint 2011 for Mac ) seems clearer, friendlier, and more modern. It feels more like Apple’s Keynote, which I mean as a compliment.
The feature changes are mostly minor and subtle yet useful. Even so, PowerPoint 2016 for Mac still lags behind its Windows counterpart—and it also lost a few interesting features that were present in PowerPoint 2011.
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New and improved
The most obvious change is a nicely redesigned ribbon, which is now nearly identical to the ones in PowerPoint for Windows and PowerPoint Online. If you knew where everything was in PowerPoint 2011, prepare for a bit of relearning. Almost every ribbon control is still there, but many have been moved, renamed, and given new icons. The erstwhile Themes tab is now called Design; Tables, Charts, and SmartArt (among other features) have been subsumed under a new Insert tab, and a number of tabs (such as Picture Format and Table Design) appear only when the appropriate object type is selected.
The entire toolbar is gone, with only four vestigial icons (for File, Save, Undo, and Repeat) next to the Close, Minimize, and Zoom controls. Although most toolbar icons have been relocated onto one of the ribbon tabs (and also have corresponding menu commands), you can no longer create a customized set of icons for your most common tasks.
A new sidebar (much like Keynote’s Inspector) appears on the right side of the window when you invoke certain features, such as the Animation pane (which lists all the animations on your slide), the Format Pane (for editing the attributes of shapes, graphics, and other objects—including such previously hard-to-reach settings such as 3D Format and 3D Rotation), and Comments. Each pane gets its own tab, and you can tear off any tab to make it a floating palette. I like the way this context-sensitive interface consolidation (along with the streamlined ribbon) reduces screen clutter.
When you open PowerPoint 2016, you’re presented with 24 brand-new themes. Although that’s less than half the number of themes in PowerPoint 2011, there’s a new twist: each theme has numerous variants. With one click, you can select a different combination of color palettes, fonts, and background styles for your current theme (but with the same overall design); or you can apply those attributes individually. Although the theme chooser displays no templates (basically fill-in-the-blanks presentations, each with its own theme), you can type a keyword in the Search All Templates field at the top to display matching templates, which you can then download with two clicks.
Another noteworthy improvement is better integration with OneDrive and Office 365. Presentations are now saved to your OneDrive by default, and if you want to use OneDrive for storing and syncing your data, it couldn’t be easier. Unfortunately, unlike PowerPoint for iOS, the Mac version doesn’t have native support for Dropbox, iCloud Drive, or other cloud storage services (although you can manually save a file to any folder on your Mac, including Dropbox and iCloud Drive). Sharing presentations (with or without editing privileges) is much simpler now too, and even someone without a copy of PowerPoint can view and edit your shared presentation in PowerPoint Online. And people collaborating on a presentation will appreciate the new threaded comments feature.
Other minor new features include a more flexible presenter view, better conflict resolution (for when multiple people make changes to a slide at the same time), and a dozen or so new transitions (matching those in the Windows version).
Gone but not forgotten
A number of features disappeared, too. The Help mentions only one of these: you can no longer save a presentation as a movie (you can work around this by using screen-recording software such as ScreenFlow). In addition, you can broadcast your slides live using the PowerPoint Broadcast Service, compare two versions of a presentation, or use the Scrapbook to store and reuse text and graphics snippets.
Macworld’s review of PowerPoint 2011 lamented the absence of features found in the Windows version, such as the capability to adjust the starting and ending points of movies, sounds that play in the background across slides, and an advanced timeline for editing a slide’s animations in a graphical format. Those features are still absent in PowerPoint 2016 for Mac. Other Windows-only features are embedding YouTube videos; trimming, bookmarking, and fading audio; customizable keyboard shortcuts; animation triggers (animating an object when you click it); inserting online pictures from within PowerPoint; and embedding fonts in your presentation (for proper display on computers without the same fonts).
Bottom line
For Mac users, the more apt question is how PowerPoint stacks up against Apple’s free Keynote app. When I reviewed Keynote 6.0, I complained about features that had been lost in its most recent overhaul; since then (it’s now up to version 6.5.3), some of those features have been restored, and its reliability has improved. I now consider the two apps equivalent in usability, overall power, and likability.
However, each has features the other lacks, so your choice will depend on which features are most important to you (and which ecosystem—OneDrive/Office 365 or iCloud/iWork—you feel most comfortable in). For example, PowerPoint has nothing like Keynote’s signature Magic Move transition, its tables lack Keynote’s extensive spreadsheet capabilities, and Keynote (still) lets you trim audio and video and save your presentation as a movie. On the other hand, PowerPoint offers easier and more flexible path animation, the fabulously useful Arrange > Reorder Overlapping Objects command (for a 3D view of all the objects on a slide), and the option to play presentations in a separate window (which is especially useful when giving remote presentations using an app such as Skype).
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PowerPoint 2016 for Mac is, as I say, pleasant to use, not to mention powerful. If it had feature parity with the Windows version, Dropbox and iCloud support, and a Magic Move-like transition, it would be nearly perfect—and I’d love to see that happen.
Editor's note: Updated one 8/3/15 to correct information about the ability to export presentations as a series of graphics.
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Microsoft PowerPoint 2016 for Mac
PowerPoint for Mac 2016 is powerful and pleasant to use. Whether you should use it over Keynote depends on the features you need.
Pros
- Modern, friendly user interface
- Improved ribbon layout
- Theme variants
- OneDrive/Office 365 integration
Cons
- No customizable toolbar
- No Compare feature
- Can't save as a movie or series of graphics
- Fewer features than Windows version