A Look at PowerPoint 2000 The , the , and the

What Users Will Like real tables      support for animated GIFs aliased fonts (with Windows 98) and font previews picture bullets auto-fit text saving to web improved narration animated bullets--but are they a good idea? PowerPoint 2000 finally implemented real tables, and they did a very good job. More on this later. PowerPoint 2000 now plays animated GIF files in slide show. If you are using Windows 98, PowerPoint will take advantage of its aliased font feature. If you have aliasing (smooth display of fonts) turned on (in the Windows/Settings/Control Panel/Display dialog) you will see it in all parts of PowerPoint. If you have it turned off, you will see it only in Slide Show view. Picture bullets: you can now specify any picture (bitmap or vector) as a bullet. PowerPoint resizes the picture to match the height of the text; you can control this a little using the % controls in the bullet dialog. (Format/Bullet) Auto-fit text: this is a feature that automatically changes the font size of text in the body object as you type, allowing more lines of text to fit on the slide. It only goes “so far” so you can’t abuse it too badly. Saving to web pages: 2000 does a much better job on this than the previous release. more on this later. Previous versions of PowerPoint recorded narrations as one large sound file that played with the presentation. PowerPoint 2000 automatically breaks up your narration into sound bits for each slide, each of which can be re-recorded individually later. Much improved for those who use this feature. You can specify animated GIFs as bullets. Unfortunately, no matter how you set up the GIF, the file will loop endlessly. This makes this feature all but useless, since a slide full of looping animated bullets makes audiences nothing short of nauseous.

What Users May Not Like support for animated GIFs only tri-pane view saving to web on-line collaboration presentation broadcasting short menus The things users may not like have a lot of overlap with the things they might like. Animated GIF support was a great start, too bad they didn’t implement it correctly. All animated GIFs, regardless of their internal settings, will loop endlessly. Bad news. Sad also is that there is no native support for the best animation format around: shockwave. Fortunately, these files can be added using the VBA controls. For more information on this including specific instructions, download flash.ppt from http://www.bitbetter.com/powertips.htm Tri-pane view is the new UI for looking at presentations. Most users find it annoying and turn it off. Those who use the outliner extensively will probably like it. Saving to the web is truly a mixed bag: if you have IE5, you’re in great shape. If you, or anyone you want to show your presentation to doesn’t use IE5, then your life is harder. more on this later in the presentation. On-Line collaboration--the idea of multiple people viewing and editing the same presentation at the same time--is a compelling idea poorly implemented. more on this later in the presentation. Presentation Broadcasting: another big compelling feature that will be out of the reach of most users due to its extreme technical demands and system requirements. Short Menus. A long time ago, Microsoft shipped “short menus” (menus that only show the most used commands) with MacWord 4. It was extremely unpopular, and short menus were never seen again. Until now. I guess everyone who lived through it the first time retired. These are a bad bad bad idea. Luckily, they can be turned off.

Saving to the Web: the Choices Save Publish Netscape 3 or higher IE 4 or higher both IE 5        Netscape 4.7  file size large small extra-large   = Mediocre layout, no builds, no sound, no transition effects. However, link buttons work, links work, pictures display fine.      = everything looks great and works the way you expect it to, as long as you remembered to set the web options to “show slide animation while browsing”  = Don’t even think about it. Nothing but garbage on the screen; illegible in 4.7; causes crashes in lower versions after screen fills up with alerts. note: publishing or saving any presentation results in an all-black slide for those slides with flash objects.

Online Collaboration Leader Attendees 1. Leader schedules meeting; email sent to attendees with info 2. Leader sets up link to Public Server and phone conference call Online collaboration supports remote presentation-based meetings. This has all of the Public Server problems of Presentation Broadcasting, AND an even worse user interface. While Presentation Broadcasting is difficult to set up, it is very straight forward once the set is done. Not so with this. It is hard to set up AND hard to do once set up. 3. Attendees clicks on link in mail to connect to Public Server 4. Leader adds people to meeting; attendees sees slides, listens to audio through telephone 5. Leader controls who can edit the presentation

PowerPoint Version Info 2000 and ‘97 same file format, no down-rev saving 2000 tables: display in ‘97, but can’t be edited ungroup tables in 97 to edit when reopened in 2000 they are not editable animated gifs from 2000 display but won’t play in ‘97 mac version of 2000 (Office 2001) due by end of year won’t have presentation conferencing or collaboration will have tables, animated gif support