Office 2013 Public Preview: PowerPoint 2013

The world’s most popular and full-featured presentation solution gets a major update in Office 2013 that’s largely centered on creating more beautiful and professional presentations. But the best feature, perhaps, is a killer new Present View that takes the guesswork out of presenting.

Key new and improved features include:

Presenter View. The hugely improved new Presenter View works seamlessly with two displays giving you a new set of tools you can use to annotate slides while presenting, see the next slide, see a grid of slides of quick navigation, view your notes, and more.

(Screenshot courtesy of Microsoft)

Present tools. New onscreen present tools give quick access to a slide navigation grid, slide zoom, and other tools.

Theme variants. Many themes come in multiple variants, with different colors schemes and other elements, so you no longer have to hand-edit themes as frequently to achieve exactly the right look.

Master-level guides. Now, you can set fixed guides in a master slide and be sure your other slides are consistently laid out.

Smart guides. In addition to supporting alignment guides, which are common across several Office applications, PowerPoint has smart guides that help you line up graphics so that they’re positioned properly on your slides.

Eyedropper color selection. A new Eyedropper tool helps you get exactly the right color for a heading or other element by selecting a color from anywhere onscreen, including an image in the current slide.

Better media. PowerPoint 2013 supports more video formats than its predecessor, and you can play music in the background during a set of slides or an entire presentation.

Shape merging. I don’t do a lot with shapes, but PowerPoint 2013 lets you create new custom shapes by combining two or more existing shapes using actions like union, combine, fragment, intersect, and subtract.

But wait, there’s more. In addition to the features listed above, PowerPoint 2013 also includes a number of new and improved features that are common across several Office 2013 applications. You can find out about these other new features in New Features in Office.