If you have a touchscreen laptop or a two-in-one Windows laptop/tablet device (like a Surface or something similar), you may not be taking advantage of it to its fullest extent. One of the most useful things about having a touch screen is the ability to use Microsoft Office’s Drawing tools. Here’s how you do it. If your device is touch-enabled, you should see a “Draw” tab in Word, Excel, OneNote and PowerPoint. If not, you can turn on the menu by selecting  File > Options > Customize Ribbon > Draw. You should see a menu that looks roughly like so (th ..read more

Microsoft has been rolling out more and more features to PowerPoint to allow you to tell your story in a more visually appealing way. First, they rolled out video recording features, and now they’ll soon be releasing a way to insert a live camera feed using the PowerPoint Cameo feature. Here is how this feature works. First off, do note that this feature is still rolling out, so you might not see it immediately. When you do, however, here’s how you play with it. Open up a new or existing presentation in PowerPoint. To insert a live camera feed, select “Insert -> Cameo” You can turn the cam ..read more

Occasionally, you may have had a need to record a video of a PowerPoint slide show, maybe with your face superimposed in the corner (we’ve all seen those kinds of video presentations). We’ve used the free FlashBack Express screen recorder when we’ve had those needs in the past, but now you can record a slide show presentation right from within PowerPoint where you can have teleprompter prompts, notes view, and more. Here’s how you do it. So first off, open up your slide show you want to present. We’re just using the basic “Welcome to PowerPoint” slide show that comes with PowerPoint for our ex ..read more

Microsoft is doing its best to make the Office 365 suite more useful for folks that are looking to add a little more flair and pizzaz to their documents. The icons features and vector images support is a step in that direction. They’ve gradually added more content to their premium content library and you can insert all sorts of other content. The latest addition to their content library? You can now add Cartoon People in Office to bring your documents and presentations to life. This feature is still rolling out and will be available in Word, Outlook, PowerPoint and Excel. Here’s how you play w ..read more

Microsoft Teams is becoming the de-facto way to share, present and collaborate. As always, PowerPoint is used as the program of choice to create presentations for use for slide shows (virtually or otherwise). Since PowerPoint is generally the starting point for a lot of Teams presentations, Microsoft has made it easier to get going by adding a Present in Teams button to PowerPoint. Here’s how you use the feature next time you need to present a slide show in teams: Join a Teams meeting or an ad-hoc Teams call. Open your presentation in PowerPoint for Windows. Click the Present in Teams button ..read more

Sometimes you just need to get down to business in PowerPoint, especially if you’re presenting to a client. You don’t want to have to open up the presentation, click on the slide show, and do all those steps. If you want a presentation to start immediately upon opening it, here’s how you do it. First off, you need to create your presentation. You’re on your own here. Once you have your presentation how you like it, Select File > Save as (or Save a Copy). Hit the drop down so that you can select type of file: Select the “PowerPoint Show” option and save your file. The file is saved as a ..read more

Ever needed to convert an existing Microsoft Word document into an epic PowerPoint presentation? A new feature in Word for the Web will create PowerPoint presentations based on all the summary sections of a document, adding imagery, icons, videos, themes and fonts with advanced AI. Here’s how you do it: Open any document you want to convert into a presentation in Word for the web. Click File > Export > Export to PowerPoint presentation. When prompted, choose a design theme for your presentation. It does a pretty good job of reading ..read more

If you are preparing to give a big presentation, it’s always good to practice. Ideally, you practice in front of other folks in your company so they can give you input on what you might need to change. However, sometimes you need a little help that only AI-powered technology can provide, and you can get that with PowerPoint Presenter Coach, which is a feature built into PowerPoint for the web or PowerPoint for Android. Presenter Coach listens to your presentation using your device’s microphone and evaluates your pacing, pitch, your use of filler words, informal speech, euphemisms, and cultural ..read more

When you’re giving a PowerPoint presentation, you always want to make sure you have the latest updates to the slides available. Not only because you want to make sure you’re presenting the newest and most correct information, but because once you start the presentation, you’re unable to make changes on the fly. That is now changing as there’s a new feature in PowerPoint that allows you now have slides updated by your team on the fly, even when the presentation is in Slide Show mode. You can have changes made by your team synchronize changes either automatically or manually. Automatic Updates ..read more

The animated GIF is one of the Internet’s oldest technologies, and it’s getting a resurgence with memes on various social media sites and collection/search sites like GIPHY and Gfycat (with GIPHY being used for the GIF search in Microsoft Teams). While there are online tools you can use to create your own animated GIFs, you can now use a tool you’re familiar with: PowerPoint (via Office 365) can now export to GIF. It’s basic functionality, but it’s there. First, create a slide show that you want to turn into a GIF. In my case, I’m going to create an animated GIF of our staff. So I put everybod ..read more