The New PowerPoint Web App

Last week we announced the release of the new Office Web Apps.  Today, we’re excited to talk a bit more in depth about the new things available in PowerPoint Web App. We’ve packed a ton of new features into this release all oriented around helping you be more productive. We wanted to make it super-easy to build great presentations quickly and effortlessly on the Web and with the new PowerPoint Web App you can.

New look and feel

We’ve overhauled the UI to feel fresh and up to date while reducing chrome and giving you more space to work. Reading mode has a nice, dark theme which gets out of the way and makes your content the hero, and higher fidelity slides ensures your hard work looks its best:

Shapes!

You asked for it and we heard you. With the new PowerPoint Web App you can insert, arrange, rotate and format all the shapes you’re used to. Even better – all this manipulation happens right in the browser in full fidelity without waiting! If you’re using a touch device we make it even easier to grab the corners so you can resize and rotate shapes with confidence.

To make formatting even easier we also added one of the most requested features – format painter:

Beautiful presentations

We want your presentations to look their best – no matter if they’re made on the Web or in the Rich Client. In the new PowerPoint Web App we’ve made it even easier to get the look you want with support for our new theme families – accessible from the Design tab on the ribbon:

To add some dynamic flare you can now add animations and transitions to your slides! We also made it super-easy to change the options and adjust the timing on existing animations or to apply a transition to all the slides in your deck:

Last but not least we’ve also added support for audio and video playback in both Reading mode and Slide Show. Even better – it uses HTML5 so plug-ins aren’t required! Stay tuned in the coming weeks for a more detailed blog post on the new multimedia features of PowerPoint 2013.

Working together

One of the things that makes the Web great is the ability to easily work together with other people. With the new PowerPoint Web App you’re able to coauthor not only with other Web App users but also with people using the PowerPoint Rich Client! When your presentations are stored on SkyDrive you don’t need to worry about friends or coworkers having the right version – everyone can edit the file.

Another key component to working together is being able to comment. We’ve spent a lot of time overhauling how you comment in PowerPoint and are excited to bring you a great experience across the Rich Client and Web versions:

Sharing your ideas

In the first release of the PowerPoint Web App we gave you the ability to embed a presentation in your blog or web page. Unfortunately those presentations were just static pictures of your slides – how boring!

Now with the new version we’ve upgraded the embedding experience to make it better than ever. The new experience is fully interactive. All your content plays back right in the embedded object. That means all your animations, transitions – even audio and video! Better yet, any presentations you embedded using the old feature have automatically been upgraded to the new experience – no work from you required!

To embed a presentation simply click “Share” -> “Embed” from the file menu. We’ll pick four sizes that automatically fit the aspect ratio of your presentation and let you pick the one you like best:

We hope you enjoy the new PowerPoint Web App – we’ve had a great time building it and are extremely excited to finally share it with you. We also love getting feedback about your experience using the Web App so please share (it’s easy – just click the “Feedback” button in the upper right corner):

Dan Swett
Program Manager, PowerPoint