Every year I review the updates to several of the Microsoft tools that are commonly used. This week I am focusing on PowerPoint. Before we get into the latest updates let’s take a brief look at the history of this powerful program.

History

A quick search into the archives of Microsoft shows that PowerPoint was created at some point in 1987 by a company that was not Microsoft. The company that created PowerPoint is called Forethought, INC and Microsoft bought both the company and the program, according to Wikipedia. This cost Microsoft somewhere in the range of $14,000,000, which with inflation today, would be somewhere in the range of $35,323,330. It was a very basic program at the time designed to supply visuals for group presentations within business organizations, but its influence has grown mightily over the years. PowerPoint at its infancy was used for printing graphics that would end up on transparencies. You remember them, right? Flimsy plastic, that was seen through pieces of paper that you would print on and then you could use vis-a-vis markers to write on in a dark room instead of using the chalkboard.

Needless to say, PowerPoint has grown quite a bit. I remember in High School using PowerPoint and having that annoyingly happy paperclip bouncing around my screen while you were creating your presentation. This was back in the late 90’s and early 2000’s and we thought that presentations would never be as good.

Boy, we couldn’t have been more wrong. Every year PowerPoint continued to be improved. Some of these improvements came faster because of the last two years and some were long overdue. As I looked through every update, I have narrowed down the list to my 5 favorites. Even as this post goes out, I am sure I will miss some of the latest updates since Microsoft continually makes improvements! Without further ado and not in any particular order, here we go!

Mike’s Top 5 Updates!

Gridlines

I know, this one might seem anticlimactic, but I think this is one of the best improvements they have made over the last year. Have you ever tried to line up items in a PowerPoint slide, but every box seemed to be off by just that much? With the improvement of adding Gridlines that stress is now taken away. They have added this feature in both the Windows edition (which we use) and in Mac (which you might use outside of the classroom). All you need to do to activate is to select the View tab and check off the Gridlines appearing on the slides.  When you are presenting, participants don’t see the lines.

Cameo

Cameo allows you to enter live feeds inside of your PowerPoint Presentation. Check out this video on how to use it.

Cameo helps make PowerPoint presentations more interactive and livelier. I know, this would have been great two years ago and apparently it was in beta testing starting in 2020. This feature has been available since earlier this year.

A couple of cool notes with Cameo is that you can set it up only on specific slides.  If you have more than one camera plugged into your device, the cameras can switch between the two on different slides. For example, think about presenting a problem on slide one and then on slide two you have your document camera showing how to go about solving the problem.   You even can customize the way the camera appears. In the example in the video above, Mike Tholfsen shows how you can change the shape of the camera to fit cleanly into the presentation. So, so cool!

Cartoon People

As you are creating slides you now can add cartoon people inside of your PowerPoint. You’re probably thinking, ‘Hey Mike, I always had the ability to do this!’ and you are right. In the past to accomplish adding cartoon people you would have to download and upload them as images into your PowerPoint. In the newest update to cartoon people, there are a lot more people and parts to choose from. Since they are already installed in PowerPoint, you don’t need to go outside of PowerPoint to find the people you may want to include.

Updates to Slide Recording

Have you ever wished that you could have a teleprompter when creating videos so you could just look at the camera? Recent slide recording updates allow information placed in the notes section of a slide to be the text you read for your presentation. In presenter view the text is above the slide. This means you can just look at the screen and read instead of looking in a different direction for the script. You can now blur your background in the video while recording. You can now change the microphone and camera. In the past, you were not able to easily change the microphone and camera that you are using. Microsoft has also added a laser point to use in the video.  Video export has been simplified so that a user doesn’t have to work as hard to figure out the details for recording.

Backgrounds of Pictures

Have you ever wanted to use a picture in your slideshow but there is something awkward in the background? PowerPoint now gives you the ability to remove images from the background. When I think about content I’ve made, it makes me think all the time that I needed to remove a poster from the background of an interview. This tool would have made that job a lot easier. You’ll find this option in the picture format tab, under Remove Background and tools will become available to mark the areas that you need to remove, then poof, it’s gone!

Other Updates Worth Noting

I am not going to go into detail about each of these items below, so I encourage you to check them out on your own.

• Embedded Captions in PP Videos
• Updated Dictation Languages
• Replace All improvements
• Advanced Morphing
• Designer
• Break Times
• Slide Sorter
• Presentation Coach
• Presenter View in Teams

These are my favorites, what are yours? Leave us a message below and look out for next week’s post on updates to Flipgrid (First hint: It’s got a new name)