Microsoft is continually exploring innovation in the area of presentations and you may have seen Bill Gates show the TouchWall / Plex demo, a recent example of this work.  We probably had the same reaction as you the first time we saw that demo, “hey I want it, when can I get Plex?” I know for us, the first time we saw Plex, we thought it was really cool and we wanted to create presentations like that! That’s the benefit of our job, we get the chance to play with innovative technology and we’re exploring ways to share it with you as well.

It turns out the Plex presentations shown for the TouchWall were custom created by a few designers and software developers on the Office Labs Envisioning team.  If we wanted to make a Plex presentation ourselves, it would have required quite a bit of technical and design skill, along with a lot of time for each individual presentation.

We didn’t have that kind of time, and much like you, the vast majority of our presentations are in Microsoft Office PowerPoint.  We wanted to see if we could create something that allowed us to quickly make Plex-like presentations using PowerPoint.  We collaborated with the PowerPoint team and out came the pptPlex concept prototype.

If you’ve already downloaded, thank you. If you haven’t downloaded it yet, read on to learn how you can create your own Plex-like presentations with a few easy clicks. To use pptPlex to create a Plex-like presentation, start with a slide deck, add a few sections by clicking the “insert new section” button, select a background by clicking the “canvas background” button, then press “from overview” and you have a Plex-like presentation!

Lots of us here at Microsoft have been quietly using pptPlex for several months. The main feedback we’ve heard from our co-workers is “when can we use this for presentations with people outside of Microsoft? I have these new capabilities and I want to use it with my presentations to everyone.”  So, here it is.  We hope you’ll enjoy it too.

Let us know your thoughts on pptPlex. What works for you, what doesn’t? Is it easy to create Plex-like presentations?