Technical TrainingNew Features—PowerPoint 97
PowerPoint 97—New Features
IS&T Technical Training
November 13, 1998 / Page 1Technical TrainingNew Features—PowerPoint 97
New Features In Powerpoint 97------1
Creating Presentation Basics------1
Slide Finder------1
Automatic Spell It------1
Multiple Undo------1
Summary Slide------1
Expand Slide------1
Speaker Notes------2
Slide miniature in outline view------2
Black-and-white view------2
Presentation comments and review------2
Adding Drawings And Graphics------3
Office Art------3
Enhanced charting------4
Consistent colors------5
Graphics file formats------5
Multimedia And Web Support------5
Animation effects and multimedia capabilities------5
Active Web------6
Active Web search------6
Hyperlinks------7
Action buttons------7
Action settings------7
Image map authoring------7
Save to HTML------7
Save as Web animation------8
PowerPoint Viewer------8
Delivering Presentations------8
Pack and Go Wizard------8
View on two screens------8
Meeting Minder------9
Action items------9
Custom shows------9
Presentation conferencing------9
Kiosk presentations------10
Save to HTML------10
Save as Web animation------10
PowerPoint Viewer------10
Graphics file formats------10
General Features------10
Office Assistant------10
AutoContent Wizard------11
Design templates------11
PowerPoint Central------11
ValuPack------12
Tutorial------12
Making the Transition------13
New PowerPoint 97 menu commands for PowerPoint 95 users------13
New Powerpoint 97 Menu Commands For Powerpoint 4.0 Users------16
How To Find Powerpoint 95 Commands In Powerpoint 97------20
How To Find Powerpoint 4.0 Commands In Powerpoint 97------23
Powerpoint 97 And 95 File Formats------26
Convert Powerpoint 95 Presentations To Powerpoint 97 Format------26
Share Presentations With Powerpoint 95------26
Save Presentations In The Dual Powerpoint 95 & 97 Format------26
Save Powerpoint 97 Presentations In Powerpoint 95 Format------27
What Happens When I Save A Powerpoint 97 Presentation In Powerpoint 95 Format? 28
November 13, 1998 / Page 1Technical TrainingNew Features—PowerPoint 97
New Features In Powerpoint 97
Creating Presentation Basics
PowerPoint 97 provides many new features to make the product easier to use.
Slide Finder
Slide Finder (the Slide from Files command on the Insert menu) makes it easy for you to find and preview slides from existing presentations—even on a corporate network—and to insert only those you want to use.
Automatic Spell It
Just as in Word, PowerPoint 97 checks your text for spelling errors as you type and marks possible errors directly in your presentation. When you right-click the marked text, it offers suggestions for corrections you can make right at that time.
Multiple Undo
You can select exactly which change you want to reverse from the Undo list on the Standard toolbar. You can also change the number of undo's you want PowerPoint to track by increasing or decreasing the number in the Options dialog box (Tools menu).
Summary Slide
You can use the new Summary Slide button on the Slide Sorter or Outlining toolbar to create a summary slide of your presentation based on titles of slides you select. By adding hyperlinks to the titles, you can also convert a summary slide to an agenda slide. With an agenda slide, you can jump to related sections in your presentation.
Expand Slide
The new Expand Slide command (Tools menu) automatically breaks a crowded slide into multiple slides for a cleaner, more organized presentation. It turns each top-level bullet point into individual slides and the subpoints into bullets on corresponding new slides.
Speaker Notes
In addition to creating and editing notes in notes view, you can now add speaker notes in slide and outline views. As a result, you can work on your notes and on the contents of your text and graphics at the same time. The Speaker Notes window remains open until you close it—even when you move from slide to slide.
Slide miniature in outline view
When you're working in outline view, PowerPoint 97 now provides a miniature version of the slide you're working on, so you can easily see when you've filled the slide with text and need to insert a new slide.
Black-and-white view
You can use black-and-white view, new in PowerPoint 95, to see what your slides will look like when printed in black and white. Just right-click any object to view or change the way it will print in black and white. These options don't change the way the presentation looks in color.
Presentation comments and review
You can now add comments (yellow "sticky" notes) to presentations without revising the actual contents of the slides—making it easier for users to get valuable feedback and input from others. You can display or hide comments, and you can change the shape and color of the comment note. When a comment is attached to a slide, PowerPoint automatically displays the Review toolbar. You can use this toolbar to send a task to Microsoft Outlook to remind you of something you need to do. When you've finished reviewing the presentation, you can use Microsoft Outlook to mail the presentation to another teammate.
Adding Drawings And Graphics
PowerPoint 97 provides a new set of drawing and graphics capabilities so you can easily create charts and embellish your text and graphics with 3-D and shadow effects; textured, picture, or transparent fills; and AutoShapes.
Office Art
OfficeArt—the new drawing tools shared by all Office 97 programs—gives PowerPoint 97 superior graphics capabilities that can be easily accessed through the new Drawing toolbar. New or enhanced features include:
AutoShapes. The addition of six new AutoShape categories—connectors, block arrows, flowchart symbols, stars and banners, callouts, and action buttons—makes drawing diagrams, building flowcharts, annotating documents, and adding navigation buttons much easier.
Bezier curves. With the new curve drawing tool, it's easy to create beautiful, exact curves with point precision.
3-D effects. You can transform 2-D shapes into realistic 3-D masterpieces with new 3-D effects, and you can even change the lighting perspective of a 3-D object.
Perspective shadows. You can now select from a wide range of shadows with perspective, and you can adjust the depth and angle of each shadow to make pictures more realistic.
Connectors. You can create diagrams and flowcharts with new straight, angled, and curved connectors between the shapes. When shapes are moved, the connectors remain attached and automatically reposition themselves.
Arrowhead styles. With the new arrowhead styles, you can change the width and height of arrowheads for maximum impact.
Object alignment. You can now distribute and space objects evenly—both horizontally and vertically.
Precise line-width control. You can take advantage of increased control over the width of lines by selecting preset options or customized line widths.
Image editing. For easier viewing, you can easily adjust the brightness or contrast of a picture.
Transparent background. When you want an inserted bitmap to appear to be a part of the design on your slides or Web pages, you can turn background colors into transparent areas.
AutoClipArt. New in PowerPoint 95, AutoClipArt automatically scans a presentation for difficult-to-convey conceptual keywords, such as "teamwork," and suggests graphics elements that can give your slides a more professional touch. PowerPoint 97 gives you even more conceptual keywords, and it associates those keywords with additional elements in the Clip Gallery.
Enhanced charting
Graph 97—the much improved charting module for PowerPoint and Office 97—is easier to use and a more graphically rich charting package than ever before. It includes the following:
Additional chart types. PowerPoint 97 gives you new chart types—such as bubble, pie of pie, and bar of pie—and additional 3-D and 2-D chart types—such as cylinder, pyramid, and cone.
Time-scale axes. You can now automatically group your time-based charts by month or years to see the appropriate level of detail for your time analyses.
Chart data tables. You can enhance reports by adding explanatory detail to a chart. You have the option of simply attaching a data table that contains the numbers represented in each series right on the chart.
Rotated text on chart axes. To display all necessary data proportionally for easier viewing, you can easily scale fonts and rotate text along the chart axes.
Picture, text, and gradient fills. To graphically represent data, you can now fill chart elements such as bars, areas, and surfaces with textures, imported pictures, or gradient fills.
Animated charts. For added multimedia impact, you can now animate bars, data points, or other chart data.
Consistent colors
You can match colors used in a PowerPoint 97 presentation with colors used in any other Microsoft Office document. Across Office programs, colors of shapes and objects can be selected from the same 40-color palette—ensuring consistency as you copy and paste your work between programs.
Graphics file formats
You can now save the work you create in PowerPoint 97 in a number of additional graphics formats, including JPEG, WMF, EPS, PICT, and GIF.
Multimedia And Web Support
With the extensive set of new PowerPoint 97 features, you can create highly interactive multimedia presentations and take advantage of the World Wide Web and the Internet.
Animation effects and multimedia capabilities
New in PowerPoint 95, buttons on the Animation Effects toolbar can be used to animate text and objects. You can also create a button to click during a slide show that will take you to a particular slide, run another presentation you've embedded on a slide, or launch another program.
Custom animation. PowerPoint 97 includes more animation effects for text and objects, as well as the Custom Animation command on the Slide Show menu—a new and easier way to define and preview animated effects. In a single dialog box, you can define the animation effect, rearrange the animation order, set the length of time before each animation begins playing, and preview the animation.
Animated charts. For added multimedia impact, you can now animate bars, data points, or other chart data.
Voice narration. You can record the presenter's voice to deliver a presentation in a self-running slide show, and then send it online or on disk to remote audiences.
Music Tracks. Available in the ValuPack folder on the CD-ROM, the Music Tracks add-in can be used to accentuate animation effects or to add customized background music and sound effects to your presentation without significantly increasing file size. You select the style, length, and tempo you want for the music, and Music Tracks composes it—on the spot—to match your criteria. You can set the background music to automatically fade at the end of a presentation or to transition slightly as you advance your slides.
Native AVI control. You can play movies directly from within PowerPoint for improved playback performance and better color palette management.
Clip Gallery. Available in the ValuPack folder on the CD-ROM, the new Clip Gallery does more than store simple graphics—it also organizes sounds, movies, and pictures in one convenient location for easy creation of multimedia presentations.
Animated templates. PowerPoint has a number of professionally created presentation designs that include animation effects. These animation effects are saved to the slide master and will automatically be added when you create your slides.
Active Web
You can use the Active Web—shared by all Microsoft Office programs—to browse rich webs of presentations and documents on your local computer, any server, an intranet, or the Web.
Active Web search
PowerPoint 97 is integrated with the Active Web searching technology, through which you can easily find various Microsoft Office or HTML documents on a network or an intranet.
Hyperlinks
You can create hyperlinks in a presentation so you can jump to specific slides in the presentation, to another presentation, to a Word document, or to an address on the Internet. You can create a hyperlink from any text or object, including a shape, table, picture, or action button.
Action buttons
PowerPoint 97 includes a set of built-in 3-D buttons for such actions as Forward, Back, Home, Help, Information, Sound, and Movie. You can click these buttons during a slide show to start another program, play a sound or movie, or link to other slides, files, and Web pages.
Action settings
The new Action Settings command (Slide Show menu) makes it easy for you to define an interactive action for an object. You can specify the destination of a hyperlink, select a program to start, or specify a sound or movie to play—all in one dialog box. You can also assign two different actions to an object and then use the mouse-over method to start one action and the mouse-click method to start the other. For example, you might move the mouse over an object to play a sound and then click the same object to jump to another slide.
Image map authoring
PowerPoint supports the ability to attach an action setting to a particular spot on a slide. One such setting can be to a URL to a Web site. When you save the slide as an HTML document, the interactive "hot spots" on the slide become image maps that can link to different locations on the Web.
Save to HTML
You can convert your presentation to Web pages by saving the presentation file in a standard HTML format.
Save as Web animation
You can save your presentation as a PowerPoint Animation file and embed it in an HTML document. Then, using the PowerPoint Animation Player—a free Internet browser extension—you can watch it launch into a slide show automatically and run in a protected window on an HTML page.
PowerPoint Viewer
You can use the PowerPoint Viewer to run slide shows on computers that don't have PowerPoint installed. Available in the ValuPack folder on the CD-ROM, the Viewer is a program you can freely redistribute. The improved PowerPoint Viewer for Windows 95 supports password protection for kiosks and also supports hyperlinks to other slides and to URLs on the World Wide Web.
Delivering Presentations
PowerPoint 97 offers a rich set of tools to make it easy to deliver PowerPoint files in every conceivable situation—including traditional or formal presentations, kiosks, meetings or informal presentations, and "virtual" presentations on the Internet.
Pack and Go Wizard
New in PowerPoint 95, the Pack and Go Wizard can be used to compress and save your presentation across multiple disks—including all linked documents and multimedia files—making it easy to take your presentations on the road or give them to others. If you're not sure the computer to be used has PowerPoint installed, you can also choose to pack your presentation with the PowerPoint Viewer.
View on two screens
You can use the new direct cable connection to connect two computers so you can view both your notes and the Stage Manager tools on your screen, while your audience sees only the slide show view of the presentation on a big screen or display.
Meeting Minder
PowerPoint 95 introduced the Meeting Minder—where you can record notes, minutes, and action items and automatically generate a slide at the end of a presentation that lists all recorded action items. With PowerPoint 97, you can now keep the Meeting Minder dialog box open and available throughout the meeting, so you can record notes and action items as they occur. You can also ask the Meeting Minder to automatically send action items directly to the task list in Microsoft Outlook and to schedule the next meeting in Microsoft Outlook.
Action items
With the redesigned Action Items tab in Meeting Minder, you can now record owners, due dates, and descriptions of each task. Then you can automatically add action items to the Task Manager in Microsoft Outlook for easier tracking and for scheduling the completion of follow-up items.
Custom shows
Within a single file, you can create mini-presentations that are tailored for different audiences. Each presentation file contains a core set of slides, and the Custom Shows feature keeps track of multiple versions of that presentation, eliminating the need for additional disk space to store and maintain numerous versions. You simply select the slides you want to include in each custom show, as well as the order in which you want to show them to a specific audience. Because PowerPoint tracks the slide identification of specific slides in a custom show, you can freely reorder slides or add slides to the core presentation without the fear of ruining any custom shows you defined previously.
Presentation conferencing
With PowerPoint 97, you can deliver your presentation over Windows NT Server and a Novell network, corporate intranets, and the Internet. The Presentation Conference Wizard guides you through setting up a connection to your audience—whether your audience is located across town, in another city, or in another country.