Microsoft Garage Releases Social Share for PowerPoint

While Microsoft Garage is well-known as an in-house app incubator of sorts, most of its wares to date have been for mobile platforms like Android and iOS. But Microsoft Garage’s latest release is for a more familiar Microsoft platform: It’s an add-in that makes it easier to share PowerPoint presentations.

Called Social Share, this PowerPoint add-in lets you share slides or an entire presentation to Facebook and Twitter right from within the application. You can share these items as images, photo albums, or as a video, making it easier than ever for presenters to distribute presentations and more widely to large social networks.

So why PowerPoint? It seems like Microsoft is busy these days trying to replace its monolithic, function-heavy, traditional office productivity solutions with newer, smaller, more focused mobile apps, after all.

“PowerPoint has rich editing, animations and photos that people might want to share on social media,” says Om Krishna, a senior software engineer with the Wildfire group in Office, which created Social Share. “We thought PowerPoint would be a good way to start to find a simple way to share content.”

Krishna also adds that the sharing goes both ways: Comments to shared posts can be viewed from within PowerPoint as well.

“This is my favorite part, being able to bring comments and interactivity and show it in the activity pane on the right side,” he says. “We bring all the interactivity on Facebook and you can see it in PowerPoint, bring it all together in PowerPoint.”

And as you may recall, Social Share isn’t the only recent add-in for PowerPoint that seeks to update this august solution for a new era.Office Mix helps you change your unidirectional presentations into interactive online lessons that you can share with others. So while you use PowerPoint to create a presentation, you use Mix to create a … mix.

You can download Social Share for PowerPoint from the Microsoft web site.