PowerPoint for iPad has been updated with PowerPoint Designer - a new tool that gives you suggestions on how to make your presentations clearer and more appealing. PowerPoint Designer can be accessed from the Design tab on the PowerPoint ribbon.

Last week, we walked you through how to get started quickly with, make the most of, and master every app in Microsoft Office. Maybe you missed one, or want a quick guide to all of them. Well, here you go.

When you're giving a presentation, a little mystery goes a long way. If you want to grasp your audience's attention, start off your presentation with some visuals that get them thinking.

Last week, I tried to get a subscription to Microsoft Office. I expected to simply find an Office licence that included what I needed for a simple price. Instead, I discovered that Microsoft's Office licenses are infuriatingly complex, making it nearly impossible for anyone to get what they need without overspending.

PowerPoint lets you put presentations together in a snap, but your slide shows can be dull and boring if you only know the basics. It's time to learn how to customise templates, add animations and slide transitions and make slide notes.

If you do a lot of public speaking or presentations in front of people, Zoho Showtime could make your life (and job) easier. Showtime makes it easy to take questions from your audience, let them save slides or go back to see previous ones, and you can control the presentation from your phone.

The term "death by PowerPoint" was coined because so many people have abused the use of PowerPoint presentations. Often they are unnecessarily long and, visually, not that interesting, leaving audiences who have to suffer through them bored out of their minds. This totally defeats the purpose of giving a presentation, which is to engage people and help them better understand what you're trying to say. Here's a video on how turn your boring PowerPoint presentations into interactive slides with the Prezi software.

Powerpoint is dead, guys. Microsoft has a newer, cooler, slicker presentation app in Sway, a superpowered Web-enabled cloud-syncing social-friendly Windows 10 and Office 365 app.

Imagine seeing a young student attempt to twist in a screw using a hammer. I think we can all agree that angrily grabbing the hammer from the student and throwing it away would be a mistake. A more constructive response would to be to simply clarify the true purpose of a hammer. The same principle applies to the much-maligned PowerPoint.

It was recently argued that universities should ban PowerPoint because it makes students stupid and professors boring. I agree entirely. However, most universities will ignore this good advice because rather than measuring success by how much their students learn, universities measure success with student satisfaction surveys.

Any university teacher who does not harbour a painful recollection of a failed lecture is a liar. On one such occasion, I felt early on that I had lost the students entirely: those who hadn't sunk into comatose oblivion were listless and anxious. Ungracefully, I threw myself even deeper into my PowerPoint presentation to save me from total ruin. Years later, I can still hear myself reading aloud the bullet points from the overhead and see myself turning around to the students to sell these points to them.

Android: Today, Microsoft announced that it is expanding its Office for Android beta. Now, you can install it on any 7-10" ARM-based tablet running KitKat or higher. You don't even need an invite anymore.

The Document Inspector is a relatively obscure Office feature which helps identify elements of documents that could pose a security risk. The next updates for Excel, Word and PowerPoint add some new options to check for, including checking embedded documents.

Microsoft Office has so many options that often the trickiest task is working out where to find the option you need -- something the Ribbon interface doesn't entirely solve. Office Online, the free browser-based version of the suite, now incorporates a "Tell Me" feature, where you can search for what you want to do using plain English and relevant menu choices will automatically be displayed.

Microsoft has officially released Word, Excel and PowerPoint for iPad users -- and the basic apps are free. Here's what you need to know.

Colours are important to make your presentations look good, but not everyone has a good sense of which ones complement each other. Zach Holman suggests a cheat: go to a site like ColourLovers and look through palettes suggested by designers.

If you spend lots of time working with PowerPoint, you'll want to check out this free resource offering all the keyboard shortcuts you can use in the program to save time and boost your productivity.

If you want to grow in your career, you’re going to have to present to business people — the phrase we geeks use to refer to everyone who isn’t technical. And you’ll need to present well. Successful geeks are the ones who can bridge the divide between technical and business groups. If you invest in preparation, not only will you accomplish your goals, you’ll find that giving presentations isn’t difficult at all.

If there are a bunch of graphics, videos and other elements in a Word or PowerPoint file, you can extract these individual elements with an archive program. It's handy if you have a billion images in a huge presentation file.