This tip applies throughout office 2007, and is with regards to the zoom feature. Most of us use [Ctrl] + mouse scroll down/up to zoom in or out. However, this does so I n increments of 10 per cent. For obsessive compulsion people like those of us here at Digit, we often find our document zooming to just inside the screen boundaries or just out of it. In such cases the perfect zoom might be something like254 percent. Using the zoom slider at the bottom right of the office application window, you can achieve these exact zoom levels.

When you add a new slide that has blank content placeholders, you will see that PowerPoint 2007 offers little icons in the middle that act as shortcuts to particular types of content. These icons symbolize adding either a table, chart, smart art graphic, picture, clip art, media files, or plain text.

In order to animate your slides, you have the Animation tab, which puts everything in plain sight and within easy reach. From within the Animation tab, look for the custom animation button ([Alt] + [A] + [C]). This will open up a Custom Animations pane on the right, from where you can add animations to individual content of your slide, instead of animating the entire slide itself. Once you have added your effects, you con just drag them about to reorder them, which make storyboarding your slide very easy. Also remember to play your animation, using the little play button at the bottom of the customs animation plane, to check your progress.In this same pane, you con set various parameters of the animation, including the event (time delay or on click), directions and speed. Every effect in that pane also has a drop-down arrow, which will reveal further option.

For keyboard warriors, the most irritating thing about the new PowerPoint is the fact that a few of the shortcuts have changed. What most people don’t realize is that Office 2007 has shortcuts for every single menu item, which previous versions did not, and they’re easy to identify as well, thanks to the little letters that pop up when you press [Alt}. It’s advisable that you learn the keyboard shortcuts if you spend a significant amount of time using any Office application, and all you have to do is learn visually using [Alt] and the cues (called Key Tips) provided; it couldn’t be simpler! Most of the older [Ctrl] + [some key] shortcuts are left unchanged, so you really will not find yourself too frustrated.

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