PowerPoint 2008, the presentation maker included in the bundle, can export creations as a series of pictures — but not video — to iPhoto ‘06 and later. Alternately, users can save the slides to the Mac’s Pictures folder.

“From there, sync pictures to your iPod or iPhone through iTunes as usual, then use the built-in photos or slide-show program on your iPod or iPhone to show your presentation,” said Blair Neumann, a program manager in Microsoft’s Mac development group, in a post to the team’s blog Tuesday. IPhones and iPods that boast video viewing — the iPod touch, the newest iPod nano and the iPod classic — can also connect to a larger screen television or a projector using Apple’s $49 component AV cable.

Apple Inc.’s own Keynote presentation maker, one of the three applications in the $99 iWorks ‘08 suite, can also export its slide shows to iTunes. From there, Keynote presentations can be synced to iPods or iPhones.

Microsoft will release Office 2008 for Mac on Jan. 15 at the Macworld Conference & Expo in San Francisco in several editions priced from $150 to $500

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Is full wireless syncing support appropriate for a flash-based player? Microsoft’s $199 8GB Zune certainly ships with a raft of features, but unless you need a light player with wireless functions, you’ll probably be able to find better values elsewhere.
The 8GB Zune is a little thicker than one of the last-generation iPod Nanos. That puts it on the large side for flash-based MP3 players these days. Its audio quality sounded a little better to my ears than that of the latest iPod Nano, on a par with Creative’s Zen V. One tiny annoyance, though: The player’s 20-step digital volume control doesn’t provide much granularity. Occasionally, I’d reach points where one step was too low and the next too high.

The Zune supports MP3, WMA, WMA lossless, PlaysForSure DRM-ed audio, and its own DRM format for Zune Pass subscriptions. If you’d rather listen to radio, the Zune includes a built-in FM tuner. It also plays back video and displays photos on its 1.8-inch 320-by-240-pixel screen, and   the Zune   now supports h.264 and MPEG-4 encoding in addition to WMV.

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