PowerPoint’s path animation tools exceed Keynote’s in some respects (PowerPoint’s paths are much easier to define and edit) and bring PowerPoint 2011 closer to PowerPoint 2010 for Windows. PowerPoint 2011 fills a huge gap in the previous version’s animation repertoire by adding motion paths, which let you move objects along tracks that are predefined or that you draw from scratch. Annoyingly, though, you still can’t trim movies by adjusting their starting and ending points, nor can you add sounds that play across a specific set of slides.Īs in PowerPoint 2008, you define the timing, duration, and order of animations by using the Custom Animation tab in the Toolbox. You can even choose a picture file as the movie’s poster frame, and you can pause and scrub through movies during a slideshow, a feature that was missing from PowerPoint 2008. New options let you crop, color correct, rotate, and add other effects to movies, which are now imported into presentations by default instead of being linked to. Like Keynote’s Instant Alpha, which lets you make an image’s background transparent, PowerPoint 2011’s Remove Background tool lets you select which parts of a picture to retain and which to clear. Enhanced mediaĪ new Media Browser conveniently consolidates access to photos, sounds, clip art, symbols, and shapes in one place, and PowerPoint offers a dizzying array of ways to manipulate the size and appearance of graphics that you import or generate within the program. UI redesign: A new graphical interface makes it easy to rearrange items on a slide. Although you can similarly arrange slides hierarchically in Keynote, only PowerPoint lets you name each group of slides. In addition to helping you keep track of objects on individual slides, PowerPoint 2011 helps you organize complex presentations by placing related slides in sections in the navigation pane.

You drag the pane to move the object on it toward the front or back. As you mouse over each one, it lights up and a number indicating its position appears in the corner. In addition to conventional commands that let you move individual elements forward or backward, PowerPoint 2011 sports a clever new view that displays every object on the slide on a series of translucent sheets that appear to float on the screen.

With these changes, PowerPoint’s view options are considerably more flexible than Keynote’s.Īnother interface enhancement makes it easier to work with busy slides that contain multiple overlapping objects. For users who prefer not to reach for the mouse, new keyboard shortcuts let you zoom in or out in 15 percent increments. That’s much more convenient than the toolbar’s magnification menu, which is still there. A handy new control lets you adjust the size of slides in the Normal and Slide Sorter views.

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