Thursday, October 18, 2012

Presentation Summit 2012

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AppId is over the quota

PowerPoint is a versatile communication tool, and millions of people use it every day in very creative ways. As engineers, we like to understand how customers use our product and how we can make it better. That’s why we flew down to Arizona this week to attend the 10th annual Presentation Summit in Scottsdale.

Summit1Experts from around the world gather every year to share techniques for creating effective presentations, and the attendees come away with a completely new perspective on how to approach their slides.

I always return with an increased understanding of how I can improve my own communication skills, and a list of things that we can do to make our customer’s lives easier when using our software. This year was no exception.

There was, however, one thing that was different about the conference this time around: there were a number of times when someone would sit down with me to show me a problem they were running into, and I could finally say “we’ve fixed that.” It’s such a good feeling to see the smile on someone’s face when we show them the new version of PowerPoint working exactly the way they want it to work.

There are a lot of things that are better than they have ever been before in PowerPoint 2013, and it’s thanks to direct feedback from customers like you, many of whom we’ve met in person at the Presentation Summit over the years. There’s no better way to make the right changes than to develop real relationships with real customers. We’ll be working hard to keep this up, and we can’t wait to jump into some of the suggestions we picked up this time around.

Summit2

To everyone who was there with us this week: we can’t wait to see you again next year in Fort Lauderdale. To everyone who has never been or who wasn’t able to make it this time: we hope you’ll be there too. We love seeing how you use the product, and we are intrigued by the interesting ways you use PowerPoint to share ideas and change the world. If you can’t wait a whole year to talk with us, please feel free to comment and share your story here on this blog, and let us know what you think of the new version, which was released to manufacturing today.

See you next year!

-Christopher Maloney


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Introduction to Office Web Apps Server

We have a post on TechNet discuss our new on-premise solution for organizations that want to host Office Web apps on their own networks. If you read desire on a more technical discussion on our new server offering, see introduction of Office Web Apps Server.

Nick Simons
Senior Program Manager - Office Web apps


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Print Your Publications Professionally

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AppId is over the quota

Amir Mehrabian, the program manager responsible for our printing features, delves into the improvements we made for commercial printing in the new Publisher.

Publisher is a powerful program that enables you to create a wide variety of publication types, without having to be a graphic designer. You can create publications as big as a fifteen-foot banner or as small as a business card. More often than not, your publication is ultimately destined for the printer, but sometimes your trusty little desktop printer just isn't sufficient. For example, imagine you want to print a very large banner, or invitation cards on special paper. Most desktop printers are incapable of printing huge posters and are not efficient or economical for printing a large number of invitations. In those cases, you may want to take your publication to a print shop with more advanced and specialized printers, inks, and paper. Publisher makes that easy as well.

As part of our planning for the new Publisher, we did a thorough study of the different commercial print options available to our customers today. Our findings showed that commercial printing has come a long way in recent years, and that modern printers are much more sophisticated than they were when some of our older printing features were designed.

Today's print shops universally accept (or even prefer) PDF files for documents to be printed. They often have powerful tools for analyzing and preparing PDF documents for printing that they don't have for other formats. As a format that represents a fixed presentation of the document, and that can also include many advanced settings that can be important for professional printing, such as specific named PANTONE colors, PDF has become a popular standard for taking your publication to a print shop.

In the new Publisher, we've embraced the role that PDF plays in commercial printing, and invested in enhancing our PDF output, while at the same time simplifying the experience for you.

In the new Publisher, you no longer have to choose a color model for your publication. In prior versions of Publisher, several different color modes were supported, with RGB mode for screen and desktop printers, and single, process, and spot color modes for more specialized, commercial printing cases. We have simplified this in the new version, and now use RGB mode for all cases, enhanced to export additional color information when saving the publication.

In particular, since you are likely taking a PDF version of your publication to the printer, we added the ability for Publisher to save any process color values (CMYK) and named (PANTONE) colors you have used in formatting text or objects in your publication to the PDF when you export your file. Printers today have very sophisticated registration and conversion tools for PDFs, obviating the need for you to worry about color models, trapping, or overprinting settings before sending jobs to the printer. This simplifies things for you, and the printer, and increases the likelihood you'll get the best results from your print job. Just create the publication you want, using any combination of RGB, process or spot colors, export as a PDF and head to the printer!

If you have publications that you created with older versions of Publisher and saved in a color model other than RGB, they will be converted to RGB when you open them in the new Publisher. In it important to note that while the publication is now in RGB mode, any named PANTONE colors, and colors specified in CMYK values, are preserved. When you save or export your publication, Publisher will save all available color information, making it easy for your printer to do the right thing.

As mentioned above, if you're taking your publication to a print shop, you'll likely want to export the pub as a PDF file. In addition to the ability to simply "Save As..." a PDF, Publisher also has the Pack and Go wizard to make it easy to export your document with the settings you want.

To export your publication, first save your file, and then go to the "File" tab, select "Export" and then "Save for Commercial Printer".

Choose the desired quality and type of output you want, and then click on "Pack and Go Wizard". In the dialog that opens, choose where you want your final output to be saved. You can then take the output files to your print shop of choice.

While you're on the Export tab, you might notice a new option under Pack and Go, "Save for a Photo Printer". This option is handy for some types of publications, such as photo books or albums, where printing at a photo center can be a low cost alternative to commercial printing.

For several version now, Publisher has had the ability to save a single page of your publication as a file in an image format, such as JPEG or TIFF. The resulting file is essentially a big picture of your page, like the files generated by your digital camera. In the new version, we've added an option to the Export tab that makes it easy to save not just one, but all the pages of your publication as images.

When you use the Pack and Go Wizard to export for photo printer, you simply select the desired output format, and then choose a location. You can choose between JPEG, which generally results in much smaller files, or TIFF, which can sometimes result in higher quality images. All of the pages will be exported to a folder, named after the name of your publication, at the location you specified in the wizard.

Once you have your images, you can print them just as you would any other digital picture or image file!


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Friday, October 12, 2012

Getting your Flash on with Ludum Dare!

Getting your Flash on with Ludum Dare! « Adobe Education Leaders function clearSearch() {document.search_form.s.value = "";} .avatar {vertical-align:middle}.credit {font-size: 50%;}adobe.com      Adobe Education Leaders / Getting your Flash on with Ludum Dare!By Joseph LabrecqueFlash Player (1)Flixel (1)Gaming (2)  

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Join the Microsoft Office Insiders Program!

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AppId is over the quota

Join the Microsoft Insiders ProgramDo you use Microsoft Office in a unique and interesting way and want to tell the world about it?  Are you the 'tech savvy' person amongst your friends and family, and find yourself frequently using multiple devices to stay productive?  Were you one of the first to try Office Preview?  If so, you may be a great fit for the Microsoft Office Insiders Program.

Microsoft is looking for families, college students and small businesses (1-24 PCs) that use PCs, Macs, or mobile devices on a daily basis to participate in the Office Insiders Program.  If selected, you will get exclusive access to the team at Microsoft, with the latest information on upcoming releases, real time training and the possibility to participate in future marketing and PR events.

In order to be considered for the program, visit our Facebook Page and complete the seven-minute survey.  Hurry, space is limited!

Know someone else who may be interested? Be sure to tell your friends and family!

Related Information:

What is Office 365 Home Premium?

Try Office Preview for free 

 


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Make your images look their best

Today's post comes from Alyshia Olsen, to improve the program manager responsible for our photo-editing tools in the new Publisher.

People use Publisher to a lot of different types of publications - newsletters, photo albums, and brochures for example. These publications look with rich images better. In the new publisher we have with you easily publications create professional effects with a few simple clicks.  Our new graphic features can be used to optimize images, the over or underexposed or one to emphasize certain part of an image.

You can change your image brightness and contrast as well as the colors of the image from a set of default styles.  Go after you insert an image to see previews how your image with the preset effects will look for formatting graphic Tools tab on the Ribbon. As you hover over the options under corrections and Recolora live preview appears in the publication.

Recolor the first conform, we added the ability to photos based on a desired color palette (for example they make black and white, or sepia or toned to a certain color to the rest of your publication are the same.)

The Gallery Recolor is on the picture tools tab with all the tools, you need to fit your publication photos:

Here are the results of the few recoloring effects. Black and white and sepia are shown below, but you can choose any color from the color picker:

The next conform, which we added to the possibility of photos too dark, washed out to correct or need just a little bit a different effect really shine. The corrections Gallery is on the picture tools with a variety of brightness and contrast Presets tab to help you quickly correct your images or make more in the deep tools to fine-tune.

The results of some of our corrections effects are shown below. You can see that a washed out image is better looks with less brightness and more contrast, while a gloomy picture with more brightness and less contrast looks better. Try these effects to your pictures, look their best in the publication to get.

Adjust your images to help you, we moved to the command to cut to shape to a more accessible location: in the crop drop - down-list Format tab image tools .

 

Simply select a shape, and then drag the crop markers around the shape to your image in a circle, oval, cropping or other form in our gallery!

During the harvest:

After the harvest:

In the new Publisher, we can, from any image beautiful full-page image backgrounds create added. Fill all image adjustments that you want, such as recoloring or add transparency, and with the right mouse button image and choose apply to background. This command is found on the tab page design image calculations. You can then fill the background, or tile - the image in the background.

You can mix and match all these image adjustments and cropping, to customize the look of your publication. The page in the picture below has a color, and changing brightness and contrast, and was applied to the background of a page:

This new image adjustment options offer you more choice than ever before, allowing you to get the right look for your publications. All these changes were you from the image adjustments feature crew brought. We hope that you try some of these built-in options in the next publication!


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Catch the window before it shuts

Despite the shaky UK economy, brands are continuing to invest billions into digital advertising – both online and through mobile devices.

This is one of the findings from the latest advertising expenditure report from the Internet Advertising Bureau (IAB); with advertising spend shooting up by 12.6 percent to £2.6 billion in the first half of the year.

Fuelled by the rocketing number of smartphone and tablet users, mobile advertising alone grew by 132 percent to £181.5 million in the first half of 2012, from the previous year, and now accounts for seven percent of all digital advertising spend.

These results support the findings of Adobe’s Q2 2012 Global Digital Advertising Update, which we blogged about back in July.   Our report showed that whilst conversion rates for tablets are 120 percent higher than those for PCs, Cost Per Clicks (CPC) rates are markedly less than desktops or laptops, 30 percent less in fact – opening a window of opportunity in the digital advertising market.

“Mobile traffic continues to demonstrate a significant opportunity for advertisers as the industry is still yet to normalise click through rates” comments Jonathan Beeston, director of new product innovation at Adobe. “With results remaining strong for mobile, there is a growing emphasis on mobile devices as tablet conversion rates outshine desktop conversion rates.”

However, the gap in that window of opportunity is starting to close and it won’t be long until the cost per click rate starts to increase. To make the most of this, brands need to act now to make sure they don’t get shut out by their competitors.

“There’s still time for brands to get in there and reap the benefits delivering greater ROI but they need to move quickly before this ever shrinking window shuts,” adds Beeston.


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