You can control plenty of visual elements. Shapes can have shadows and flows, softer edges, and more polished 3D effects. You can add effects to the edge of photos (to give a photo a torn-edge look, for example) and control shadow effects (you can control transparency, level of blur, and color).
Changes In Real Time
Basic text handling is improved. At last you can have strikethrough and ALL CAPS font properties just as with Word, and kerning control has been added if you absolutely need precise text control. PowerPoint 2007 lets you select the which fill and outline colors you want for outline text without resorting to WordArt. Likewise, backgrounds are now easier to control thanks to an improved dialog box of options. From gradient fills to tiling, the options you need are here.
PowerPoint 2007 also benefits from suite-wide improvements such as real-time previews of changes (you can instantly see the effect of a font change or color scheme without having to apply a change and then "undo" it). Using the Animations tab you can apply slide transitions and preview them automatically, a great time saver, though the animation effects remain mostly unchanged from previous versions. On the other hand, table formatting is leaps and bounds ahead of previous versions, and combined with quick previews it's easy to pick the look that's just right for your presentation.
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The zoom slider control has been moved to the bottom-right corner, along with icons to change the view (Normal, Slide Sorter, Slide Show Preview mode). That interface change is easy to adjust to; others will take a little more time. For example, the Insert Slide isn't on the Insert tab but the Home tab -- that makes sense, since the idea is that you should be able to use the Home tab icons for the majority of your work, but users trained to use the Insert/Slide command from previous versions will need to adjust, as will having to use the Insert tab to work with headers, footers, clip art, and links.
Speaking of inserting slides -- if you are connected to a SharePoint server, you can share your slides with others using a Slide Library. It's just as easy to incorporate a shared slide into your own presentation (you have the choice of using your own theme or the theme stored with the shared slide), and you can set SharePoint to notify you whenever you open your presentation and the shared slide you're using has changed in any way.
A "selection and visibility" panel lets you focus on individual items on a slide; click an item to temporarily hide it while you work on other elements, then click it again to make it reappear. It's now easier to add action buttons (yp click to advance to the next slide, for example), add slide numbers, fill a graphic with an image, apply a gradient to a line (new in 2007), replace one shape with another, and in general handle a myriad of graphics chores.
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