This is the second in our 4-part series on Microsoft Office 2013. We focus today on PowerPoint 2013. I’ve recorded a 5″ video to take you right inside the application and show you these features:
1. Like Microsoft Word, when you Start PowerPoint, you’re taken to a page where you can choose from a wide variety of attractive templates. Many of the templates have color schemes, i.e. blue, green, red from which to choose.

2. The default view is a wide-screen now. With most folks having wide-screen monitors, you’ll see a 16:9 view instead of the regular 4:3.
3. As in Word, there are now alignment guides to help you place elements (images or boxes) on your page and have them align perfectly horizontally, vertically or both.
4. Eyedropper. If you are wanting to get an exact color to match from one object to another (be it a font color or a slice of color from a graphic, the eyedropper makes it easy to select a color and apply it to match another component of your slide.
5. New Presenter View – now the audience sees the current slide, but YOU, the presenter, see the next slide on your monitor, along with your notes. There are other options in presenter view that are new. The icons below are on the presenter’s screen:
Pen-a laser pen. Click it and then highlight something on your slide
Square-show all slides and easily skip to a slide later in your presentation (your audience won’t see this)
Magnifying glass – zoom in on a portion of the slide
Screen-black out the screen option to take things ‘offline’ during a presentation
Circle-more options, choose to show the last slide, black out the presentation, end the presentation
PowerPoint 2013 Features Video
Here’s where I demonstrate the features mentioned above. – hope you enjoy and get something useful out of this.
PowerPoint 2013 Resources The Microsoft Office Blog and the Microsoft site in general have a lot of great help. Below are verbal how-tos for merging shapes and using the eyedropper.
http://blogs.office.com/b/microsoft-powerpoint/archive/2012/10/18/powerpoint-2013-eyedropper.aspx
Checking out Office 2013
Microsoft is running and has been running promotions for both Office 365 and Office 2013. You can use both for one month for free. Check out details here.
I tried out Office 2013 during the consumer preview and now I have the suite installed on all my computers. I just enjoy upgrading to the latest and this upgrade with the new presentation options in PowerPoint, and the alignment guides found in both PPT and Word, along with the ability to open and edit PDFs in Word has really sold me. What features are YOUR favorites?