By Jim Calloway

Subscribers to Microsoft 365 are by now used to receiving product updates without warning. So today we will discuss new and undiscovered PowerPoint features that you may have missed.

Some lawyers only open Microsoft PowerPoint when they agree to teach a CLE presentation. But there are many more uses for PowerPoint. If I was still doing consumer bankruptcy law, I would have a client-facing monitor and use some basic bankruptcy slides to accompany an initial client interview. With bankruptcy including so much financial and dry statutory information, a few slides with illustrations of the points could assist a new potential client’s focus.

Among the noteworthy items are adding your own voice narration to a video embedded in the PowerPoint and using PowerPoint to create animated GIF’s for sharing on social media or otherwise. Creating animated GIF’s is not significant for lawyers normally, but here is a way to create one. It’s easy to miss a misspelled word on a PowerPoint and now there’s a way to spell check the entire PowerPoint in one operation.

North Carolina Bar’s Catherine Reach has produced a nice little primer on PowerPoint. https://www.ncbar.org/2021/11/16/whats-new-in-ms-powerpoint/.  It covers these newly-added features as well as some that many users have yet to try.