One of the pet peeves that many slide designers had with previous versions of PowerPoint was the large dialog boxes that sometimes completely covered the slide area. If you were trying to make some changes to your paragraph spacing — or even altering the size or position of a shape — you almost always needed to close or move the large dialog box to see the changes you made! And that was certainly not in tune with the modern interface you saw within everywhere else in PowerPoint! The new PowerPoint 2013 finally addresses this issue with the Format Task Panes, which offer options that enable the user to create and customize objects more intuitively.
Learn about new Format Task Panes in PowerPoint 2013 for Windows.