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Entered CNET Catalog: 11/07/2006
SKU: CNETMSOFFICEPOWERPOINT2007PRERTM
Manufacturer: Microsoft Corp.
CNET editors' review
- Editors' Choice: No
- Reviewed on: 02/12/2007
PowerPoint is the best-known software for creating slide shows, whether they're used in a grade school history class, for a corporate sales pitch, or in conference speeches. As with the rest of the Office 2007, the changes to PowerPoint are ambitious and drastic. The new interface rearranges every function you may have memorized, and the file formats are different. Plus, while you can hide the Ribbon by double-clicking on a tab, there's no going back to a "classic" view of PowerPoint that better resembles 2007's predecessors.
Our installation of various Office editions on Windows XP computers took between 10 and 20 minutes, which was quicker than previous editions of Office. You'll have to be online to access some services, such as Help and How-To as well as Clip Art and document templates. Our reviews of Microsoft Office 2007 detail the installation process and the particulars of each edition.
Interface Once PowerPoint is up and running, you'll find that each command is in a new place. The new program is more visually focused, so colorful icons describe many features. PowerPoint 2007 adopts the tabbed, top-heavy Ribbon toolbar also found in Word and Excel 2007. The File menu is gone, its commands moved beneath the Office logo in the corner. We were perplexed by the arrangement of some features on the Ribbon, mostly with features that we expected to be on the Insert tab. New Slide is on the Home tab, not on Insert, for example. Many tabs won't appear until you select an item on the page. Clicking on a picture triggers the Picture Tools formatting tab to display. The same process applies when working with images, sounds, charts, drawing tools, and SmartArt. If your computer already has software installed that integrates with Office 2007, PowerPoint and other applications will display an Add-Ins tab. In our case, the Add-Ins tab showed commands from a third-party video-capture application.
There are some useful little tweaks as well. Right-clicking the mouse when hovering over text within a slide will display a mini formatting toolbar and drop-down menu. Right-clicking the mouse within a chart brings up editing tools specific to the chart. Power users can press the ALT key to display keyboard shortcuts. We find the strongest selling point of PowerPoint 2007 to be the dynamic galleries of images that put a variety of three-dimensional styles at your fingertips and render them live on the page before you click.
Features Designed to help you get a point across with images, PowerPoint 2007 makes some useful adjustments. Drop-down menus of styles, WordArt, and slide animations let you roll your mouse over them to preview a change on the page before you finalize it. You won't need a design degree to create a good-looking slide show. The color themes are more attractive overall than in 2003, and once you pick one, your theme will apply to the other preview galleries. There are loads of new document templates, many of which you can find at Microsoft's Web site, and you can customize your own. Next to the more elegant-looking styles from PowerPoint 2007, slide shows made in PowerPoint 2003 might look pretty flat.
However, some newbies to 2007 may find it tricky to grasp the ever-changing galleries, which can be clumsy to work with. For example, you must precisely arrange your view of a page when applying styles to prevent the drop-down menu from obscuring the changes. Sometimes we couldn't benefit from the live previews because a small picture on the page was hidden by its connected style gallery. We found SmartArt less than intuitive to use. This feature lets you create attractive flowcharts, pyramids, and other diagrams, but when we selected bulleted text to convert to SmartArt, the big button on the Insert tab didn't do the trick. The correct conversion button was a tiny item beneath the Home tab (you can also right-click the mouse).
PowerPoint offers new options for safely sharing slide shows, which should be handy if your presentation is under a nondisclosure agreement. The Prepare options beneath the Office button let you edit metadata and remove potentially embarrassing changes. When you choose Inspect Document, Document Properties will appear below the Ribbon toolbar so you can change the author name, comments, and more. The Review tab helpfully clusters commenting and spellchecking. Unfortunately, Microsoft hasn't created a way to instantly upload a presentation so you can take it on the road and access it from an online account. For that, you'll need Microsoft Groove or SharePoint server tools. You could also install a free add-in from the third-party, such as Zoho's Web-based presentations software. Zoho's application, however, remains in a rough state and lacks a lot of PowerPoint's functionality.
However, there's not much new in the way of managing multimedia files. When we clicked away from the audio icon, we had a hard time later finding the sound to edit it. An audio icon appears within the center-pane view of a slide, but it's hard to see within the thumbnails when you're scrolling through the pages. Nor are there tie-ins to Microsoft's Web-based products, such as MSN Soapbox Video, to let you make dynamic presentations that integrate online content.
Microsoft's new, default Open XML file formats could be a pain if you send and receive presentations with users who might be running older software. The new file extension for PowerPoint 2007 is PPTX. People with PowerPoint 2000 and 2003 can only open PPTX files after they install a converter. If you use PowerPoint 2007 to save a backward-compatible, PPT file, all the dynamic images and styles will flatten. Once you convert a PPT document back to PPTX, that flattened content should return to its original state. Our guide to Office 2007's file compatibility explains more.
Luckily, PowerPoint integrates better than ever with other Office 2007 applications. It's great that you can preview presentations from e-mails within Outlook 2007, for instance. And you can embed an Excel chart within a presentation and see the chart change while you edit the data in Excel in a different window.
Service and support
Boxed editions of Microsoft Office 2007 include a decent, 174-page Getting Started guide. During the first 90 days, you can contact tech support for free, and help at any time with any security-related or virus problems is also free. Beyond that, paid support costs a painfully high $49 per telephone or e-mail incident. Luckily, Microsoft's online help is excellent, although we're displeased that Microsoft and other software makers are increasingly promoting do-it-yourself assistance. We especially like the PowerPoint help, which walks you through where commands have moved since Office 2003. You can also pose questions to the large community of Microsoft Office users via free support forums and chats. Microsoft Office Diagnostics tool, included with the Office 2007 suites, is also designed to detect and repair problems if something goes haywire.
Conclusion
Is PowerPoint 2007 worth the upgrade? Probably not, if you rarely use the program. Other than the new graphical styles and dynamic galleries, there's not much new here. At the same time, PowerPoint's live graphical previews, SmartArt, and easy-to-pick design templates could make the difference between a sales pitch and a sales contract for some professionals. If you don't want your older PowerPoint presentations to be overshadowed by more up-do-date-looking ones crafted by someone who has already upgraded, then the 2007 edition will be worth your while.
User opinions
Select a User Opinion to view: 1 2 3 4
User Rating: 
2/10
Very poor upgrade from any earlier version
Pros: The 2007 version has disabled several functions that were available in earlier versions.
Cons: Can not import slides from other presentations
The 2007 version will not allow the user to import slides from an existing presentation.
The 2007 version will not allow the user to insert superscript or subscript characters into a string. Instead, the entire sentence or paragraph is converted to superscript or subscript characters.
The slide master and note masters are very difficult to use in comparison to earlier versions of PowerPoint.
Do yourself a service and save your money. Stay with the 98 or 2003 versions or buy an older version of PowerPoint.
User Rating: 
10/10
Best program of its type.
Pros: Live previews; file type; document security; integration; interface; features.
Cons: Compatibility.
User Rating: 
6/10
Something not to buy now, Yea!!
Pros: Improved over PP 2003
Cons: Don't really need it.
User Rating: 
8/10
Best PPT upgrade, but with bugs
Pros: Great interface redesign, vastly improved templates, new "WordArt" engine, nice changes in Presenter's View
Cons: Lack of animation improvements, OpenType font glitches, slow interface, some preferences now buried, bad changes in Presenter's View
My following review is based on my experience with PowerPoint 2007 from Beta 1 through the current Beta 2 Technical Refresh (B2TR)
I love the ribbon interface. It takes a little getting used to when I can't remember where something is, and having to repeatedly switch between ribbons for common tasks gets frustrating. In previous versions, I could keep a popular toolbar static and visible (like the Drawing toolbar).
However, the interface's improvements seem to cause PowerPoint to crawl. Hovering over formatting options in the ribbon previews that effect on your selected element or slide, but this is very slow. Animation effects are not previewed at all, but the interface just blinks and hangs for a moment. I trust that this is fixed in the final version.
The majority of PowerPoint users don't consider the effects of a good or bad template, and thus simply use PowerPoint's ugly defaults. PowerPoint 2007 gives a whole new range professionally designed templates with selectable color schemes. These are wonderful for text-based presentations, but the necessity of templates still interferes with picture-based presentations.
Besides the templates, PowerPoint 2007 also reduces "death by PowerPoint" by replacing the early-90s-style WordArt engine with new text effects that can produce attractive, Photoshop-like text with gradients, reflections, soft shadows, outlines, bevels, and more. And all of these same effects can apply to shapes and images.
The new Presenter's View is designed more effectively, especially for widescreen monitors. The slide notes now appear in a vertical area with zooming capability, and the previous and upcoming slides are listed horizontally below the notes and current slide. But a major inconvenienceā??at least in B2TRā??is that these slide previews contain a very small scrollbar, which can be quite difficult to click with a presentation remote. This is essential for me and other speakers who create their talks with flexibility to skip sections and edit on-the-fly.
And along the lines of editing on-the-fly, PowerPoint 2007 now indicates hidden slides in Presenter's View by covering them with a transparent white screen. This is great for easily seeing that a slide is hidden, but it's terrible for knowing what is on that slide in case you want to jump to it. When I display a full-screen video clip that fades in from black, I place a hidden plain slide before it with the title of the video in big text so that I can see it upcoming from the slide previews. But PowerPoint 2007's screening makes reading my text very difficult. They would have been better to outline the slide with a color to indicate its visibility.
With Apple Keynote's success in Mac OS X, I would have expected Microsoft to implement several similar "eye candy" animations into PowerPoint 2007. I don't mean obnoxious animationsā??PowerPoint has always had those. But Keynote is known for its very smooth, easing animations for slides and elements that look good, but are not overly distracting.
OpenType-font users beware! PowerPoint 2007 (at least B2TR) messes up any text 66-point or larger that uses an OpenType font (like those from Adobe Font Folio). After crossing this threshold, every OpenType letter in your text will overlap in the space of a single letter, and the text baseline is moved up. See my screenshot here: http://www.DJosephDesign.com/files/ppt2007otferror.jpg
Some preferences are oddly buried within PowerPoint 2007's options, and can take some time to find.
As a whole, this is Microsoft's best upgrade to PowerPoint. For the "DOS prompt crowd" who wants plain, boring, and unreadable templates, PowerPoint 2007 may be intimidating and appear pointless. But for those who truly want to give a visually professional presentation that can better communicate information through proper design, PowerPoint 2007 is worthy of the upgradeā??but a true presentation designer doesn't rely on PowerPoint anyway.
