The improved interface of Microsoft's PowerPoint marks a "huge change" in its accessibility, say experts.

Microsoft has claimed that the improvements to the application were focussed on moving towards a user "results-orientated approach" and have made PowerPoint more "user friendly".

Darren Strange, senior product manager for Microsoft Office systems, said: "If you look at some of the older versions of PowerPoint, what we were trying to do there was promote lots of very good, rich functionality and people really liked that – it was a very successful product.

"But more and more those capabilities kind of got buried in all our menus and it was increasingly difficult for people to master all of the complexity of the applications, to the extent that we were finding it was a bit difficult to have people use the full power of it."

He added that the firm has now "changed its approach" and produced a new "fluent user interface" which "uses a different philosophy".

With the new interface if a user wants to view the slide design this can be accessed by clicking on the design tab and as the user's mouse hovers it lots of different types of designs appear.

Users can then "zoom along" until they find a design they like and then click on it.

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