The Task Pane is a docked window within the PowerPoint 2010 interface that provides more options than normal dialog boxes — also unlike most dialog boxes, you can view both the active slide(s) and the Task Pane at the same time — thus the task panes provide a more streamlined workflow. Task Panes made their debut with PowerPoint 2002 (XP) — and for most of the time, they work in exactly the same way in PowerPoint 2010 except for one big difference — you can now have more than one Task Pane visible at the same time.
Learn more about the Task Pane in PowerPoint 2010 for Windows.

