Included as part of the Microsoft Office XP suite of applications, Microsoft PowerPoint 2002 is also available as a standalone product. Users of earlier versions of Microsoft's PowerPoint presentation software will slide right into creating slides, but still will notice the handy new features that have been added to this application.

A welcome addition is the print preview function, a painful omission from earlier PowerPoint iterations. Now you can see on paper how your slides will appear without having to go through a trial-and-error print process.

Even without the rest of the Office XP suite, PowerPoint 2002 allows users to collaborate on projects, and there are a number of new features in this area. When a presentation is sent to another user for review, the appropriate tools are already turned on. When it returns, the owner can automatically merge the reviewer's updated version with the original. Presentations can also be password protected, allowing reviewers to view the slide shows and add comments, but not be able to edit the file. And digital signatures can be attached to presentations for added security in shared environments.

Some of the more noticeable changes appropriately lie within the slide-creation process. PowerPoint 2002 allows users to apply animation effects and transitions to an entire presentation with a single click. You can also use more than one design template within a single presentation, so you don't have to rely on the same theme for an entire slide show. It also lets you merge two slide shows that use different templates.

PowerPoint 2002 is still point-and-click, drag-and-drop easy for slide creation. You can copy and paste multimedia files into slides (now with support for more file types and larger files). This latest version of PowerPoint also lets you view thumbnails of your slides in a pane on the left side in the normal view (paired with the outline pane, which contains just the bare information).

On the right side, the task pane houses recently used templates and tools, making it much easier to choose the layout for slides as well as add animations and transitions. Another nifty touch: Microsoft incorporated anti-aliasing (a graphics technology most often used in games) to smooth out fonts.

When PowerPoint was first released, it didn't come with a standalone viewer, meaning users without the latest version of PowerPoint wouldn't be able to view your presentations. Microsoft has since updated their free PowerPoint Viewer 97 to allow it to view 2002 PowerPoint presentations as well, although some advanced features in 2000 and 2002 slide shows are not supported in the viewer.

Users of PowerPoint 2000 may not find enough incentive to upgrade to PowerPoint 2002, but if you're still making presentations with even earlier versions of PowerPoint, this is the one that you need to click over to. --J. Curtis