Office 2010 PowerPoint on the Web A New View of Y

Hopefully by now you’ve heard about the new versions of your favorite Microsoft Office applications that are showing up on the web.  A large part of the effort behind Office 2010 has been to bring Word, Excel, OneNote and PowerPoint functionality to SharePoint and Windows Live, enabling a whole new range of distribution and interactivity. 

You may even have tried these out for yourself in the preview SkyDrive customers are currently invited to explore. If you have, please let us know what you think,Office Pro, and if you haven’t, well, you still have time to check it out.
Creating New Experiences
We’ve done our best to create web experiences for the applications that will feel comfortable to current customers, but we’ve also extended the applications to anticipate and take advantage of some brand new ways of using and viewing documents. 

Today I’m going to give you a little background into one of these new areas, the PowerPoint Web App Reading View.

PowerPoint documents were originally fairly simple collections of images, displayed as a presenter spoke.  The slides reinforced the spoken message. Typically, they didn’t encompass complete messages.  The speaker filled in the heart of what was being presented.  Over the years, we’ve seen an evolution in presentations,Office Enterprise 2007 Key, and now many business documents are created exclusively in PowerPoint.  Often the slides are distributed to those not able to attend, or for general reference.  In lieu of presenter, it’s a common best practice to annotate the slides with text in each slide’s notes panes.
A good set of notes associated with the slide can complete the document’s message for readers.
The recipient of a PowerPoint document really has two choices.  Read it in the PowerPoint Normal view, or watch it as a Slide Show. If they read it in the Normal view, they’ll see the notes but it will be missing animation and rich media. If they choose the Slide Show, they’ll see animation and transitions, but miss the slide notes. In addition, complex slide animations are often unintelligible unless viewed in the full screen Slide Show.  Addressing this has been one of the focus points of the Web App.

 

Viewed in the Normal view, animated shapes may be stacked up…

…missing the effect…

…of sequential animation.
Flexibility and Support
In anticipating how people might use of the PowerPoint Web Application, we decided early that we needed more than just the application’s current Editing and Slide Show views. Documents that live on the web are often accessed by many more people than just the presenter. A stranger to the document won’t know, for example, how many slide builds there are on a particular slide, and really doesn’t benefit from bullet points that build in on each click.  At the same time, animation can be essential to the meaning of some slides, and flattening that animation to a static image can potentially eliminate part of the message.

So the default view of presentations in the Web App both preserves animations, and allows the viewing of slide notes. So the PowerPoint Web App’s default view is a new reading-optimized view, with the following components:
Quick access to the Edit and Slide Show views A resizable window – with Silverlight installed the presentation will automatically resize to fit the window dimensions Slide transitions, object and text animation, live in the browser. Animation timings honor their original settings, and animations set to advance on click work just as you’d expect Additional controls to allow faster “browsing” and locating slides within the deck A notes pane
 
Jumping and Running
Someone who isn’t familiar with a presentation may need help in getting around,Windows 7 Ultimate, or finding material of specific interest.  Two ways of doing this are providing a faster way of browsing through slides, or  viewing a list of slides so you can jump directly to the slide you want.

The navigation bar beneath the slide provides this function.  The fast forward buttons move through slides, skipping things like object and bullet builds and showing fully built slides that will be more recognizable. 



Between the fast forward buttons is a pop-up menu that allows direct “jump” access to specific slides.  Slide titles show up in this control, making it easy to find just the right slide.  For large decks, the slides are grouped in sections that expand when clicked, making for quick scanning through a deck with a minimum of mouse movement.

The slide menu provides direct access to slides…

…slides are grouped into sections…

…that can be opened with a click.

Using these controls readers can quickly scan a presentation or jump directly to a slide of interest.
Access to Slide Show and Edit View, and More of course…
Finally, the slender top ribbon contains links to the two companion views, Edit and Slide Show.  As you might expect,Microsoft Office Pro Plus 2007, these will feel very familiar to PowerPoint’s Normal view and Slide Show command.  We’ll cover both of these in a later post. 

For now, we hope you’ll try out the PowerPoint Web App.  Please send us your impressions,Microsoft Office Pro Plus 2010, and how you think you’ll end up using it!
 
Ric Bretschneider
Senior Program Manager – Microsoft PowerPoint
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