Changes in the Next Version of PowerPoint

Over at the PowerPoint blog they've begun announcing some exciting changes that will be rolling out with the first service pack for Office 2010.

You loved it when they rolled out the new, intuitive Ribbon interface known as the Office Fluent User Interface. And the upcoming changes will be no different. The PowerPoint team has heard the cries, or rather snores, from conference rooms the world over. It may have taken eight long years for them to heed the call of Edward Tufte that "PowerPoint is Evil" but they've finally done it.

With the next version of PowerPoint, bullet points will be disabled by default. Not only that, but no more than six words will be permitted on any slide in the standard template, making Seth Godin cheer. Finally, when you create a presentation you won't be able to include more than ten slides at a time and if PowerPoint detects that it's in presentation mode for longer than 20 minutes it will shut off automatically in order to follow Guy Kawasaki's 10/20/30 rule.

Finally the makers of PowerPoint are doing something to combat the rampant plague, Death by PowerPoint.