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 1. Home
 2. From the Center Blog
 3. Microsoft Office
 4. What’s New in MS PowerPoint?

Center For Practice Management, Marketing, Microsoft Office


WHAT’S NEW IN MS POWERPOINT?


November 16, 2021

You can use a slide deck for enhancing your opening and closing statements,
educating an audience, or persuading a client. The MS PowerPoint software is
feature rich and you can do far more than just use it during a live
presentation. Because subscribers to Microsoft 365 receive constant updates to
the software here are a few new features and some older tips to get the most out
of this powerful tool.

SPELL CHECK

Like most of the MS Office products, PowerPoint will automatically identify
spelling errors and mark them with a squiggly red line. Click on the word to
ignore or update the spelling. However, it is a little harder to review spelling
in slide decks one slide at a time when you are finalizing a deck. So, before
you send your slides out be sure to run spell-check across the whole slide show.
Look in the “Review” tab and click “Spelling” in the Proofing group. The spell
check panel will appear. It checks text in both the slides and slide notes, as
well as showing word pronunciation and suggested synonyms. If you have ever
presented a slide deck with a looming spelling error on a slide you will want to
run spell check for a final review. Add the Spelling tool to your Quick Access
toolbar by right clicking on the button in the Ribbon and choose “Add to Quick
Access Toolbar”.

MINI CONTEXTUAL TOOLBAR

Recent updates to PowerPoint have expanded the mini toolbar to add more
contextual options. The mini toolbar in PowerPoint is especially useful for
reducing the need to hunt through the ribbon for formatting options, chart
options, and the Picture Format toolbar. Select an object, text, or image on a
slide and right click to see the mini toolbar. Depending on what you have
selected your options will change. One option that appears when you select text
is “Change Case”, which lets you select from a drop-down menu to quickly convert
text to all UPPERCASE, all lowercase, Sentence case, Capitalize Each Word or
tOOGLE cASE (useful when you accidently had CAPS LOCK on). However, sometimes
the Change Case option does not appear, and it is inexplicably absent the Font
group. To add this to your Quick Access toolbar click on the carat icon in the
QAT, select “All Commands” from the drop-down menu under “Choose Commands From”,
select “Change Case” and click the right arrow to move it to your Quick Access
toolbar.

NEW IMAGES AND STOCK PHOTOGRAPHY

Do not use stale images! And do not neglect to use some! Two (of the many)
reasons PowerPoint is so maligned is that people either use a slide deck they
created in 2007 with laughably stale images  and themes (remember screen beans?)
or they have a slide deck full of bulleted text (or worse, text copied and
pasted appearing in paragraph form). Under the Insert tab in the Ribbon,
subscribers to MS 365 will find thousands of high-quality stock images,
including photography, videos, illustrations, cutout people, icons, and stickers
for use in PowerPoint and Word. You can search these images or browse through
them. Once you have inserted an image you can use the Picture Format toolbar
that lets you change the color, add artistic effects, add alt text, add frames,
crop and much more. Do you miss the screen beans? Don’t worry, Microsoft is
rolling out Cartoon People to MS 365 subscribers so you can “mix and match”
drawings to combine different characters .

REUSE SLIDES

If you create a lot of slide decks you often remember you created a perfect
slide that you want to reuse. You do not have to find the old deck, open it,
find and copy the slide, and paste it into a new deck. Reuse slides has been in
the software for quite some time, but with MS 365 it is more powerful. Whether
you are starting from nothing or editing an existing slide deck, from the Home
tab in the Slides group you can click on the Reuse Slides button. A panel will
open and show you recent slide decks you have worked on, or an option to search
or browse your local drive, OneDrive, or SharePoint. Once you have found the
slide deck that has the slide (or slides) you want to reuse click on “Choose
Content.”  The panel displays a thumbnail image of the slides so choosing the
content to reuse is easy. You can insert a few slides or all the slides. By
default, the “Use Source Formatting” is selected. This tends to be helpful, so
you do not have to do extensive editing of the reused slides when they adopt the
formatting of the slide deck you are inserting them into. If, however, the
formatting of the slides you reuse does not look good with the new slide deck
you can right click on the slide and choose “Reset Slide” from the mini
contextual toolbar. This removes backgrounds and formatting so you can more
easily edit the slide.

CREATE A VIDEO

In PowerPoint you can go to the Insert tab and in the Media group add video or
audio you have created or have access to. You can also narrate audio on a slide
by clicking Audio and choosing “Record Audio” to add a narrated soundtrack.
Also, in the Media Group you can create a screen recording and insert it into
the slide deck. This might be useful for training a client on how to use your
client portal or how to add comments to a document. If you want to add a screen
recording, select all or a portion of the screen you want to capture and choose
record. If you switch to a different screen or application the recording will
still run. To stop it (write this down because otherwise to stop the recording
you will have to close the slides and lose work) click Windows Key + Shift + Q.
When you are finished produce your video by going to File – Export – Create a
Video. In the drop-down menu choose “Preview Timings and Narrations.”

Alternatively, you can create the video with audio narrations and a picture in
picture video of you talking through the deck. Just open your slide deck, got to
File – Export – Create a Video. In the drop-down list click “Record New Video”.
It will open your Slides in a Presenter view mode (it is immensely helpful to
have two screens for this!) and in one screen you can show your speaker’s notes,
toggle on or off your webcam, and choose your microphone. You can also annotate
with drawing tools. Once you are finished presenting your slides click the X on
the far right and then click “Create Video”. Your video will be recorded as a
high definition MP4 file, which can be played on most any media player and
uploaded to your website or to a social media channel.

CREATE AN ANIMATED GIF

A newer option in the Export menu is “Create an Animated GIF”. If you need to
add interest to your social media or website you can create your own animated
GIF.  Create a slide, add animation, and then go to File – Export – Create an
Animated GIF.  If you want to add your GIF to Instagram keep in mind you will
need an additional tool, like the free GIPHY Cam app, to upload your custom GIF.

PRESENT IN TEAMS

If you use Teams for video conferencing, you can easily present a slide deck in
Teams if you are a MS 365 subscriber. Open your slides and in the upper right
corner click “Present in Teams.” If you are currently in a meeting it will share
your slides with the participants, otherwise you will be prompted to schedule a
meeting or Meet Now and you can invite people to join you with the link that
will be provided. This will take you into PowerPoint Live mode. You can annotate
with pens, highlight with a laser pointer, and turn on live captions.

SHARE WITH COLLABORATORS

If you have a MS 365 subscription, click on the “Share” button in the upper
right corner. You can share your slides with multiple people and end the
frustration of emailing large slide decks back and forth with co-presenters.
Make sure to enable editing. Your collaborators will get an email with a link.
They can comment, edit the slides in their browser, or download and edit in
their installed version of PowerPoint. You can work together in real time and
review versions of the slides. Where are the versions? Look in File – Info –
Version History to open the Version History pane.

ADD A FORM OR QUIZ

If you are sharing a slide deck with colleagues, clients, students, or another
audience you can embed Forms or Quizzes into your slides if you have a MS 365
account. In PowerPoint look in the Insert tab and click on the Forms button. You
can insert an existing form or quiz or build a new one on the fly. Insert the
form and save your slides as usual. You can share the slides via email, OneNote,
Teams or other Office applications and the recipient can fill out the form in
your slide deck. If you want the file to be read only you can save the file as a
.PPSX (PowerPoint Show). The responses will appear in your form responses at
https://forms.office.com.

CONCLUSION

Microsoft PowerPoint can be a useful aid as a live presentation tool or used to
create videos, animated graphics, and so much more. You do not need the full
arsenal of Adobe Creative suite to edit graphics, get high quality stock
photography, make videos and much more. Interested in learning more? Here are
some resources from NCBA CPM:

 * (Don’t Do) Death by PowerPoint
 * Tips and Tricks with Microsoft PowerPoint (Video Tutorial)
 * Next Level PowerPoint
 * Practical and Tactical Tech Tips

 

 


WRITTEN BY

CATHERINE REACH

Director, NCBA Center for Practice Management

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