PowerPoint 12's Eye Candy

Brendan Busch, the Group Program Manager for the PowerPoint and Office graphics group (my group) started up a blog. His first post is a nice overview of our focus areas for PowerPoint "12".

Office and PowerPoint have become almost universally known for ugly, dated graphics. How many times have you seen that rainbow WordArt in some sleazy restaurant?

One of the reasons I've been psyched about PowerPoint "12" ever since we started work on it in mid-2003 is the breathtaking visuals. Just scan through the visuals in Brendan's post above and you can see what a dramatic improvement that is. Though stuff like this has been possible in Photoshop and other products, Our goal in Office to make it easy for anyone to make stuff like this without much hassle.

It's likely in 5 years everyone will be ragging on these new visuals, but in the meantime, they look awesome and it's a huge improvement over previous versions of Office.

Comments

• Anonymous
  December 23, 2005
  Obfuscatory eye candy doesn't help get the point across.
  
  The PowerPoint 12 team should read Edward Tufte's book "The Visual Display of Quantitative Information" before they let this abomination out on the office workers of the world.
  
  (I say this as a PowerPoint fan who bought the program before Microsoft bought the company. I still have a copy of my "Forethought PowerPoint 1.0" manual...)
  
  Stephen
• Anonymous
  December 24, 2005
  The comment has been removed
• Anonymous
  December 25, 2005
  PowerPoint is a tool. We leave it to you to represent your data in the way you see fit.
  
  Also, keep in mind that PowerPoint isn't only used to display quantitative data. Sometimes I just want a short number-less table, an arrow directed at my main point on a slide, or I just want some pretty text as my title. Better visuals help in all those cases too.
• Anonymous
  December 30, 2005
  Here's the thing....I can read the first two graphs. 150K and 250K. Easy.
  
  The numbers on the new slide...fuhgettabout it.
  
  The new look is a visual nightmare. Doesn't even show much drama or convey excitement - here we have a 50% jump in sales...WOW!
  
  But the newer slides don't depict much of a leap. It's visually flat and doesn't tell us an exciting story....at all!
  
  Somebody please explain... why is this new look "better"????
  
  
  
  
• Anonymous
  November 25, 2007
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