How Using Your Mobile With PowerPoint 2010 Could Help Reduce Your Carbon Footprint

Nearly 40% of the population own a mobile phone that can access the internet, and more of us are using our phones as a work tool. Here we take a look at how PowerPoint Mobile can help you while you're on the move - whether you're travelling to a client meeting, working on the train or applying the finishing touches to a slide show in the boardroom using your Windows phone.

Today it is considered extremely unusual not to own a mobile phone. Hardly any of us know someone who does not have a mobile - whether it's a simple, easy to use calls-only mobile, or the latest smartphone. As surreal as the analogy seems, the mobile brings to this century the independence and resourcefulness that the stagecoach brought to remote communities in the 16th century. The mobile now delivers mail, news, and even far off visitors right to our virtual doorstep - or desktop.

In just a few years, the majority of voice calls will be mobile to mobile, and fixed lines will mostly be used for only data connections. And it's true - if we need to speak to someone, what's the point of calling a landline number in an empty office or house when we can talk directly to the person on their mobile, wherever they are?

Keeping up with this demand is a constant challenge for developers and manufactures as mobile phones evolve fast. The newest handset model today could be obsolete in just a few months. And as network technologies develop, the amount of handsets we get through is increasing, too. There are over 1,712 mobile phone upgrades every hour in the UK alone. Handsets are designed to last around 10 years, but we tend to change them around every 18 months.

The number of handsets out there in handbags and briefcases and coffee tables is astounding: there are around 50 million mobiles in the UK - a figure that is fast catching up to the current UK population at just under 60.5 million. But with global usage of mobile phones expected to reach 2 billion this year, this love of electronic gadgets is creating a worldwide waste problem.

Faced with this massive mobile mountain, the growing pile of old handsets and sim cards is building a stack of rubbish so large that it is putting a strain on our ability to manage the mobiles at landfill. Scientists and manufactures have to look at ways of developing phones that are easier and safer to recycle. They are even looking into developing phone covers which are made of biodegradable material that can be recycled in the garden; and circuit boards made from chicken feathers.

As we think hard about what to do with our mobiles when they reach the end of their working lives, it is probably also time to think about upgrading less often, and creating less waste. It makes sense, then, to use only one mobile device for all of our communications on the go. By having one handset to make calls, order our shopping, contact our colleagues and create our presentations, we can go some way to cutting down on that mobile garbage mountain.

PowerPoint Mobile 2010 gives you many more features to use remotely in order to edit and view files - directly from your mobile phone.

If you have a Windows Mobile 6.5 phone, for example you can use Office Mobile 2010 to access and work on your documents from anywhere. And if you have a touch screen device, you can intuitively scroll through menus and navigate presentations.

PowerPoint Mobile 2010 allows you the flexibility to view and edit presentations (including presenter notes) stored on your phone, sent to you as email attachments, or hosted on a SharePoint 2010 site through SharePoint Workspace Mobile 2010. When you edit a presentation via SharePoint Workspace Mobile, you can save your changes back to SharePoint when you're online.

It's easy to view and edit your PowerPoint presentations with Mobile 2010, using many of the tools already in use on the desktop version of PowerPoint. The new Slide Manager allows a quick overview of your presentation and you can delete, hide, or quickly navigate to any slide. And there's a seamless copy and paste feature across applications, too, so editing to and from any other application on your smartphone is simple and intuitive.

You can also view or edit your presentations using many of the same tools already in the desktop version of PowerPoint. For example, you can customise a presentation by adding or editing notes. Any SmartArt graphics and other rich formatting, such as tables and charts, are accessible.

The 2010 Mobile suite also gives you the flexibility to view presentations in full screen with rich graphic effects, such as slide transitions and animation - including motion paths. The new Slide Manager allows a quick overview of your presentation which you can easily view, edit, delete, hide, or rearrange slides.

Mobile uses natural gestures to touch through menus, pinch to zoom in and out of Office documents, to allow you to easily flick your way through a file for quick navigation; and presentations can be seen in both landscape or portrait orientation.

With PowerPoint Mobile and the Presentation Companion, you can connect your phone to your computer via Bluetooth, and use your phone as a second monitor to easily view your presentation notes and advance your slides. This is ideal when you need to deliver a presentation but don't have the luxury of using multiple monitors.

This is just a glimpse of how PowerPoint Mobile 2010 can help us all work more efficiently and remotely, and also help us to grow and develop how we use mobile technology.

Talking about growing, a research project for a mobile prototype is looking at ways to implant sunflower seeds into a cover. When you're done with the device, you can plant it in your garden and the sunflower will grow, getting its additional nutrients from the bio-degrading phone cover. The cover is not available in a shop near you just yet, but here's hoping it's a glimpse of things to come.