We talked about PowerPoint 2013 last week, and promised you that you'll hear from us soon. So here it is -- in this issue, we are focusing on how you can participate in the Office Customer Preview, and install Office 2013, which of course includes PowerPoint 2013.

First things first -- if you head straight to the Office Customer Preview site and see no mention of Office 2013 anywhere on that site, don't get confused! The Preview site uses the term Office 365 everywhere, and Microsoft's vision of Office 365 is a set of services you subscribe to -- and some Office 365 subscriptions include a desktop license for Office 2013. The free subscription that Microsoft is giving away as part of the Office Customer Preview thus is actually an Office 365 subscription plan with 5 licenses of Office 2013 included. Remember that this is beta software, and is only free until the final release has been announced.

We released three blog posts this week on how you can get started with Office 2013 -- the first of these posts, Getting the Office 2013 Customer Preview Beta looked at the various ways in which you can access the Office 2013 beta. The second post, Before Installing Office 2013 Customer Preview gives you a plain English description of the prerequisites you need to have in place before the actual installation. And finally, the wonderfully detailed Step-by-Step Install of the Office 2013 Customer Preview post will show you the entire install process.

Do you have any questions related to PowerPoint and presenting, or do you want to answer some questions? Or maybe you just want to go and explore! Go to our LinkedIn and Facebook groups, and share your thoughts!

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Arranging shapes and other objects on PowerPoint slides is just one of the few things that could be more intuitive -- and did you ever want to make all shapes on your slide equally sized? If you wish that there were better aligning options that PowerPoint included, then you are not alone. Many PowerPoint users, especially those who create slide all day want features that will make their workflows simpler and faster. ToolsToo, our review product is a PowerPoint add-in that tries to be that simpler and faster option right inside PowerPoint.

Learn about ToolsToo, a collection of tools that can reduce the time you spend creating your PowerPoint slides.

Joby Blume is Managing Consultant at BrightCarbon, a presentation agency operating from the UK and Singapore. Joby has been writing sales presentations for the last seven years, during which time he has helped clients to win billions of dollars of new business. BrightCarbon specializes in creating compelling and persuasive sales presentations and Visual Conversations®, training sales people to present effectively, and supporting clients with large pitches. BrightCarbon also delivers paid-for and free advanced PowerPoint training. In this interview, Joby discusses the need for PowerPoint training. Read the conversation here.

Hong Nguyen is a software developer with 15 years of experience. He is currently based in Singapore. He started developing SlideGo as "hobby" software in 2009 due to his personal need to export PowerPoint animations to Flash. SlideGo.com has now grown into a HTML5 slide builder and still continues to add more features daily. In this conversation, Hong discusses SlideGo. Read this conversation here.

Do you want a visual of businesspeople in a meeting environment? And do you want this visual to be neutral? Then you should explore these silhouettes -- when you are presenting to a multi-racial or an international audience, silhouettes are the best options to be used in the place of people's pictures. Silhouettes are essentially outlined graphics with fills and effects applied which makes them neutral. Here are some Business Meetings silhouettes ready to use within your PowerPoint slides. The sample PowerPoint presentation that you will download contains these silhouettes in both black and white colors, within two separate slides. We have also included few more variations with some pre applied fills, styles and effects to help you to start with. You can use PowerPoint's fills, lines, and effects to make these Business Meetings silhouettes look coordinated with your slides.

Download and use these silhouettes in your slides.

Motion Path Animations -- Edit Points
Sound Across Specific Slides

Motion Path Animations -- Open and Closed Motion Paths
Motion Path Animations -- Reversing Motion Paths
Motion Paths in -- Edit Points

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