Text Highlighting comes to PowerPoint for Windows

29 June 2016

Office for Windows insiders have been promised text highlighting in PowerPoint 2016.

The lack of highlighting has been a notable omission from PowerPoint for some time. Word has it in spades, Excel has some highlighting options too.

The highlighting tool appears on the Home tab, Font block … just where you’d expect it to be.

Source: Microsoft

This feature was supposed to appear in build 16.0.7070.2019 but quickly disappeared in build 16.0.7070.2020!

Presumably the highlighter wasn’t working properly and was quietly dropped. That’s OK, it’s a beta/early release and you have to expect problems.

Hopefully it’ll appear in a later build and, later this year, be available to Office 365 customers.

Other Office for Windows changes for insiders (as announced by Microsoft).

Do more with ink: Visio now includes the Draw tab, so you can use your pen or finger to draw and annotate your diagrams.
Shape recognition: In Excel, it’s now possible to automatically transform your drawings into shapes.
Faster PivotTables: We’ve improved the way Excel PivotTables work with OLAP connections, so doing things like refreshing data and switching filters should feel a lot faster.
Better data transformation features: In Excel, you can now convert Duration values to Years and rename queries directly from the Queries pane in the Query Editor. In addition, we’ve added support for whitespace and line feeds in Query Editor preview.
Better data connectivity features: Improvements keep coming in! For example, you can now easily detect jagged CSV files and validate URLs provided by users when trying to connect to their SharePoint List.