What's new in PowerPoint 2010

New/changed PowerPoint 2010 feature - RETURN OF THE FILE MENU

As for Excel and Word, there is a welcome return for the FILE menu on the PowerPoint ribbon:

New/changed PowerPoint 2010 feature - CUSTOMISABLE RIBBON

In PowerPoint 2007 you couldn't customise the ribbon (unless you knew XML and were a techie). Now you can create as many tabs as you like:

New/changed PowerPoint 2010 feature - CONVERTING TO VIDEO

You can convert any presentation to a video (the resulting file is in WMV format):

New/changed PowerPoint 2010 feature - ARTISTIC EFFECTS

PowerPoint has a host of new features for cropping, formatting and adding effects to pictures. You can remove backgrounds from pictures, change their colours and add artistic effects, as here (it's amazing how many things you can do to a wombat):

New/changed PowerPoint 2010 feature - SHAPED CROPPING

You can now crop any picture to any shape you like:

New/changed PowerPoint 2010 feature - SECTIONS

You can add sections to a PowerPoint presentation, to divide it up into groups.  You can choose to collapse or expand sections, and even choose to print a particular section. In this example there are 3 sections - Preamble, The main bit and Ending:

New/changed PowerPoint 2010 feature - SCREEN SHOTS

You can capture parts of the screen in PowerPoint, using a built-in menu option (no more pressing ALT + PRTSCREEN):

New/changed PowerPoint 2010 feature - OTHER FEATURES

Other additions to PowerPoint 2010 include:

• There are web and mobile phone apps to let you view PowerPoint 2010 presentations, even without having PowerPoint 2010 loaded
• There are additional themes, animation effects, transition effects, WordArt effects and SmartArt diagrams
• You can edit videos inserted into a PowerPoint presentation, whether to make silly changes (adding glowing edges to a video) or useful ones (trimming overlong videos).
• The Word/Excel equation editor has been added to PowerPoint

All in all, PowerPoint 2010 is pleasanter and easier to use!