Find your way around Backstage
Backstage is a one-stop shop for doing common tasks such as saving, printing and sharing presentations, broadcasting your presentation, compressing media files embedded in your presentation and more. It brings together a variety of functions that were found in multiple locations in previous versions of PowerPoint and gives access to new features, such as broadcasting a presentation and customizing the Ribbon.
When you click the File tab on the Ribbon, you're sent to the Backstage screen. The Ribbon disappears and is replaced by a series of items down the left-hand side of the screen, most of which are self-explanatory, such as Save, Save As, Open, Close, Recent, New, Print and Help.
However, there are three choices that are not so self-explanatory but can be enormously helpful: Info, Save & Send and Options.
Info
On the far right of the screen, Info (see above) shows useful information about the file you're working on, including its size, title, author, number of slides and tags, as well as the last time it was modified and printed, the last person who modified it and similar information.
But finding information about the file is just the start of what you can do when you click the Info button. You can compress any media in the presentation to cut down its file size and to make playback go more quickly. If you have a video in your presentation, a Compress Media button appears on the Info screen. Click it and you can select the level of compression you'd like to apply to the video.
You can also protecting the privacy of your presentation: Click the Protect Presentation button in the Permissions area to encrypt it with a password and to specify who has rights to read and edit the file.
Before sharing the file with anyone, click Check for Issues in the Prepare for Sharing area -- this will let you see if you've left any hidden information or fields in the document, for instance, or if the file is incompatible with earlier versions of PowerPoint.
Click Manage Versions in the Versions area if you would like to see earlier versions of the file that have been auto-saved.
Save & Send
PowerPoint 2010 was built for a world in which documents and their contents are meant to be shared in many ways: via email, in Microsoft's SharePoint collaboration software, in the cloud or broadcast over the Internet. Click Save & Send, and you get options to do all that and more.
The Send Using E-mail option attaches the current document to a blank outgoing email, using your default mail program. You can send the document in its current format, as a PDF or an XPS (a PDF-like Microsoft format) file or as an Internet fax. If the file is stored in a shared location, you can choose to email a link rather than an attachment.
Save to Web lets you save the file to Windows Live SkyDrive, Microsoft's cloud-based file storage site. Of course, you need to have a SkyDrive account, and you'll be prompted to log in the first time you use this feature. After that, you can save the current file to any of your folders on SkyDrive.
Save to SharePoint lets you save your file to a SharePoint server for sharing with co-workers -- check with your IT department if you don't have your organization's SharePoint access information.
Broadcast Slide Show lets you broadcast your presentation live over the Internet, and you won't need any additional service or infrastructure to do it. (See "New ways to share presentations" later in this article for details about how to do it.)
The Publish Slides option lets you share slides with others by publishing them to a SharePoint site or a shareable slide library.
The File Types area of Save & Send lets you convert the presentation to a PDF or XPS, create a video of it, package it onto a self-running CD, create handouts or change it to a variety of other file types, such as .png, .jpg and a variety of PowerPoint formats.
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