Sometimes you want to adjust a group of objects together and other times you want to adjust just one element within a group. (c) Thinkstock

Recently, a new PowerPoint 2007 user from Australia contacted me about being frustrated with one of PowerPoint’s new features. You may have run across this inconspicuous feature when you attempted to move a grouped object and rather than moving the entire grouped object, you end up accidentally moving just a sub-element of that object. You may have wondered what is going on because in PowerPoint 2003 you would have to ungroup an object before you could reposition any of its sub-elements. More…

Miter joints are new in PPT 2007. (c) Thinkstock

If you regularly use shapes and lines in your PowerPoint presentations, you should be familiar with the standard line style options such as width, dash type, and compound style. All of these options were in PowerPoint 2003 and have carried over to the latest version of PowerPoint. In PowerPoint 2007, they have added a couple of new options that you should be aware of  — join type and cap type. More…

SmartArt is not PowerPoint + Bob Ross.

PowerPoint is often criticized for encouraging presenters to rely too heavily on bullet points and not helping people to communicate more visually. Microsoft added a feature known as SmartArt to help convert text into various stylized graphics. When you’re designing your PowerPoint presentation, you can quickly rotate through various shapes, colors, layouts, and styles in order to find the right graphic for your presentation.

For novice or casual PowerPoint users, SmartArt can be a handy tool for quickly making your presentation more visual and professional looking. If you decide to use SmartArt in your PowerPoint slides, you need to be careful because SmartArt is dumb. More…

Push pins in PowerPoint 2007 can be time savers (c) iStockPhoto/Talaj

If you work with multiple PowerPoint presentations each week, it can be difficult to quickly find key presentations when you need them at a moment’s notice. I’m frequently reviewing other people’s PowerPoint slides and going back and forth between several of my own presentations. There are a couple of new features in PowerPoint 2007 that can benefit heavy PowerPoint users and save you time. More…

If you’re familiar with using gradient fill effects in PowerPoint, you will have noticed a change in how PowerPoint 2007 handles gradient effects (see below). In a previous article, I showed how you could reproduce the familiar gradient fill effects from PowerPoint 2003 in PowerPoint 2007.

A side-by-side comparison of the gradient fill effect options shows how the application features have changed from PowerPoint 2003 to PowerPoint 2007.

Now I’ll focus on three new gradient features in PowerPoint 2007 that may open up some new effect options for you. More…