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Previous versions of PowerPoint had templates and Slide Masters as a way to help you create consistent and attractive presentations. Microsoft has taken this idea one step further with themes, which are sets of design elements you can apply to the slides in a presentation. Themes include color schemes, fonts, background styles, and design effects that are applied to shapes and other elements in the presentation.
 | Microsoft Office comes with 20 predefined themes that you can select from the Theme gallery. After you select a theme, you can customize it by tweaking the color scheme, font, and other elements that make up the theme. Note that it's Office, not PowerPoint, that comes with all those predefined themes. Office themes work in Word, Excel, and PowerPoint. This makes it much easier to create documents, spreadsheets, and presentations with similar designs. |
Themes aren't the only new and nifty feature in PowerPoint 2007; here's a sampling of other fun features to explore:
- Slide Reuse. One of the most useful new features of PowerPoint is the ability to reuse slides. You can do that by stealing slides directly from another presentation or by creating a slide library that serves as a central repository for slides that can be reused. For example, suppose your company creates a "mission statement" slide that will appear in many presentations. Rather than create this slide in each presentation in which it appears, you can use a slide library to store the slide in a central location.
- Live Preview. This is one of the most useful new features of PowerPoint. In previous versions, whenever a formatting dialog box appeared, you'd have to twiddle with the dialog box and then click OK to see its effects. In PowerPoint 2007, a feature called Live Preview applies changes to the current slide immediately, even while a dialog box or gallery is open. Thus, you can instantly see what effect changes will have on your slides without having to actually apply the change.
- Real Tables. Tables were terrible in previous versions of PowerPoint. They were limited in size, and people had difficulties getting them to format and align right. They were very limited when compared with tables in Word. Now, PowerPoint 2007 sports most of the same table features as Word. You can use the Draw Tables command just like in Word, and you can apply all of Word's fancy table formatting features to your PowerPoint tables. You can even merge cells! Hallelujah!
- Real Charts. Ding Dong, Microsoft Graph is Gone! Well, it hasn't really been killed off. Microsoft left it in place so you can open old presentations that contain charts created with Microsoft Graph. But the good news is that charts created for PowerPoint now use exactly the same charting features as are available in Excel.
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