Articles about PowerPoint

Microsoft has unveiled the first major update to its stable of iPad Office apps with the release of Word for iPad 1.1, Excel for iPad 1.1 and PowerPoint for iPad 1.1.

All three apps gain exclusive new features, but all gain the ability to export documents to PDF, improved picture editing tools and support for third-party fonts.

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Microsoft has released the first customer preview of Office Mix, a free PowerPoint 2013/Office 365 add-in which makes it easier to create and share your presentations.

There are new tools to record you giving your presentations, draw on slides as though they were a whiteboard, add audio or video, take screenshots or record what’s happening on the desktop, all available from the Mix tab on the PowerPoint ribbon.

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Acrobat.com Presentations offers way to create simple Flash-based slideshow presentations online which can be worked on by numerous Adobe.com members simultaneously and then be presented from their online location or exported as .PDF files for offline use.

The app's interface is similar to Adobe's Web-based Photoshop Express, and provides a comparable level of functionality: basic, but elegant and aesthetically pleasing. While the same Adobe user ID can be used to access both Presentations and Photoshop Express, the two applications are actually separate branches of Adobe's growing arsenal of Web-based services.

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Ah, the life of a security reporter: You ask Microsoft's communcations managers if the new PowerPoint vulnerability announced Thursday evening is a zero-day vulnerability, currently being exploited in the wild with no patch to shield us, and a spokesperson responds that "At this time, Microsoft is only aware of limited and targeted attacks that attempt to use this vulnerability." In other words, yes.

Security Advisory 969136 describes the new problem as one that can allow remote code execution if the file recipient opens an infected file. The Microsoft Security Research & Defense blog is rather more useful (not to mention straightforward -- yes, they're seeing it out in the wild, used in targeted attacks), recommending several defensive maneuvers while we await a patch. Those include using PowerPoint's newer version of XML, temporarily disabling the binary file format if your organization's using PPTX, and forcing legacy PowerPoint files to open in MOICE. Bloggers Bruce Dang and Jonathan Ness note that this is the first time Office 2003 SP3 (fully patched) has been successfully attacked in the wild since its release in September 2007.

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