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© 2004 by Rick Altman. All Rights Reserved.
IN THE LAST FEW MONTHS, we have had the good fortune of being able to
meet with several hundred PowerPoint users in seven cities and in two countries.
Across these cities, the users’ habits, patterns, skill levels, and projects,
were all over the map. In Dallas, we met a woman using PowerPoint to project lyrics
for church hymns; in Chicago, a man leads a team of designers using PowerPoint to
create printed brochures; in Calgary, a woman working for Canada’s Geological
Survey needs to animate the ebb and flow of glaciers through the seasons.
But these people from widely disparate places in the user community all share several common traits as PowerPoint content developers:
The writing is on the wall, projected at 3000 lumens: users are going to start turning to PowerPoint in droves for multimedia projects—everything from videos of landmark family events to major corporate marketing splashes. The turning point came two years with three critical additions to the program’s arsenal: 1) its ability to set two objects in motion at once; 2) animations that can be applied to an object’s exit, not just its entrance; and 3) the addition of motion paths and empasis animations.
Coupled with the program’s already robust support for integrating sound and imagery, all of the elements are in place for PowerPoint to make significant inroads into the largely untraveled territories of multimedia.
Now all we need is an interface better tuned for the task. Here is our list of
capabilities that PowerPoint needs to add to support this incursion of ambitious users.
Conventional PowerPoint use calls for objects to sit peacefully in their appropriate placeholders—titles at the top, bullets in the middle, and cute clip art along the sides. Multimedia creators, however, go way outside this box, with overlapping images, sometimes stacked a dozen deep, graphic elements parked off the slide ready to be set in motion, and a cadre of sound elements. Even those users who discover the Select Multiple command (usually by accident) are left dazed and confused trying to wade through their elements.
PowerPoint should take a page out of the CorelDraw interface, whose Object Manager (right) shows you every element on a page, allows you to rename them, place them on distinct layers, and above all, select them and format them, even if you can’t see them. We routinely create slides with stacks of photos, placed one atop the other, and we would love to be delivered from the all-too-familiar gyrations of tabbing through invisible objects, moving objects to the top in order to see them, or simply working in the dark.
This goes double for animating objects. In fact, if we could have only one wish granted from this list, it would be this:
We wish to be able to rename objects in the Animation task pane
PowerPoint usage has far outpaced the interface in this regard, as ambitious
users routinely animate a dozen or more elements on a slide. And while PowerPoint
identifies imported files by their names (making them easy to identify in the task
pane), elements drawn natively or pasted from the Clipboard are given hopelessly
generic names that cannot be changed. We can think of nothing that slows productivity
more than having to sift through Rectangle 1, Ellipse 7, Picture Frames 1 through
15 and the like. What a joy it would be to be able to right-click on those useless
names and change them.
The Format Painter tool on the Standard Toolbar is a terrific tool, as far as it goes. Now it is time for it to go further. With Format Painter, you can pick up font, fill, and typeface attributes from one object and apply them to another. In other words, it duplicates the attributes that you could do yourself without too much effort.
We’d like to see Format Painter be able to pick up more attributes. Like size...position...and of course, the biggie, animation settings. We routinely need to place two objects in the same position and/or make them the same size, and working this through the Format dialog box is tedious at best. And it goes without saying how useful it would be to not have to duplicate efforts with animation settings.
In fact, what PowerPoint really needs for earnest animators is a set of styles, whereby the attributes of an object, animation in particular, can be defined, stored, and quickly applied to other objects—just like in Word, just like in Draw. If you’re like us, you have a few animations that you regularly turn to. Ours are:
Imagine how much more productive you would be if you could create styles for
animation settings and be able to immediately apply them to new objects. Then imagine
taking those styles and saving them in the default.pot file so that they are
available for each new project.
The other dramatic upswing in usage among the multimedia set is the inclusion of sound to a presentation. PowerPoint does many things right here, allowing sound to be placed on a slide, attached to its transition, or associated with an object’s animation. Sound clips can be easily set to play across a number of slides, start in the middle of the file, or stop before its end. We really only want one more ability.
We want to fade.
The ability to adjust the volume of a sound clip would, overnight, cut in half the amount of effort required to create multimedia productions in PowerPoint. Today, we must head to a wave file editor, stopwatch in hand, to end a clip at the right point...all the while hoping that we don't make creative adjustments down the line that would force us to do it over again. If PowerPoint could do that for us, it would be like a gift from the heavens.
While we’re at it, we wouldn't complain if there were a Convert Sound command to act as the counterpart to the Compress Pictures function. That way, we could prep a file for the web by downsampling the clip, without having to turn to an external program.
And for good measure, how about changing the default for inserted sound clips so
that Hide Icon during Show is checked on? Either that or have the clip insert
just off the slide instead of smack in its middle, where all too often we have
seen it forgotten about by harried content builders, only to have it appear ignominously
during a presentation.
Anyone who has used Macromedia Flash or a more robust video production application would have to agree that PowerPoint’s Timeline function is anemic. First off, it's hard to find, requring a right-click on an object’s animation icon in the task pane. Second, it is hardly "advanced," as implied by its name. It’s just a tiny little thing at the bottom of the Animation task pane, and it appears to be for information only: you cannot actually shift objects to different points in the timeline.
But how cool would that be if you could! If the timeline were its own toolbar,
stretching across the entire bottom of the screen, it would define a whole new
(and we think quickly your favorite) way to sequence the elements of a project.
We have keyboard envy of Word users, because they can customize their keystroke
assignments and we cannot.
We are babes in the woods when it comes to VBA programming, content to just record
actions and then play them back. But even this pedestrian use of scripting exceeds
the program’s capabilities, as animation applied to an object is not captured by
the recording module. We wish that it were.
We like that you can zoom to any percentage that you want, but the interface is not friendly enough to make the job trivial, which zooming should be. It’s more than just having to mouse up to the Zoom tool on the toolbar, because after the zoom, you invariably have to scroll. PowerPoint needs marquee zoom capability and it needs keystrokes for the basic functions, such as zoom in one step, out one step, zoom to selected object, and zoom to slide.
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We should mention that many third-party developers have created tools that begin to address these limitations. Keith Tromer’s PowerTools is a rich set of add-ons that answers several of these deficiencies, Steve Rindsberg’s PPTools is a terrific set of additional tools, and Chirag Dalal created Volume Control to provide increased functionality for playing sound clips in a presentation. PPTools offers styles, but not for animations, and Volume Control can set volume on a slide-by-slide basis, but it cannot perform fade-ins or fade-outs. We suspect that complete solutions will have to come from Microsoft’s development team.
It is entirely likely that the PowerPoint team would respond to some of these suggestions by saying that not enough users would use these new features to justify the effort. To this we say: Just wait! As digital photography continues to explode, and as home moviemaking continues to heat up, we think it only a matter of time until PowerPoint becomes the go-to application for recreational and family video. (In early May, the New York Times ran a feature on creating family videos with PowerPoint.)
While creating videos and photo albums are labors of love, PowerPoint’s interface works against the user and inhibits a quick and efficient workflow. If we get our wishes, PowerPoint would become a joy to use.
To discuss this article or PowerPoint in general, please head to our Forum.
To learn the product better, join us for our Spring Seminar Series.
Copyright 2004, All rights reserved. Have an opinion? Share it with the Corel community at the CorelWORLD Forum. There is already quite a bit of discussion about this story. Join in.
May 2007: As simple as possible, but not simpler... · April 2007: Killer Keystrokes · March 2007: Resolution Confusion · January 2007: Fearless Forecasts for 2007 · November 2006: Epiphanies at PowerPoint Live 2006 · August 2006: Escaping Death by PowerPoint · July 2006: Notes from the Floor of InfoComm · June 2006: Beyond PowerPoint--Making Movies for Business and Pleasure, Part II · May 2006: Beyond PowerPoint--From Photos to DVDs · April 2006: It’s Your Music!--Overcoming the oppressive restrictions of iTunes · March 2006: CorelDraw X3—A few must-haves and a few missed opportunities, all in all, a credible upgrade · February 2006: Making Windows Inhabitable · January 2006: Fearless Forecasts for 2006 · September 2005: Just What is a Background Anyway? · August 2005: Meet David Dobson, Corel's New CEO · July 2005: Community, Blind Dates. and Albert Einstein: An Interview with the PowerPoint Live Conference Host · June 2005: CorelWorld 2005: Image Editors, Executive Appearances, and Krispy Kremes · May 2005: As Adobe's Shadow Grows, Is Corel Better off or Worse? · March 2005: Delivering Your Presentation: How Close to the Source Can You Get? · February 2005: Digital Photography: The Killer App of this Generation Part II · January 2005: Digital Photography: The Killer App of this Generation · November 2004: A Killer Deal for Corel Or Another Distraction? · September 2004: The Scourge that is Kazaa and AOL Instant Messenger · August 2004: The Golden Triangle: Presenter, Audience, and Slides · July 2004: A Blast from the Past: How Fast is Fast Enough? · June 2004: Guilty Pleasures · May 2004: A Personal Wish List for PowerPoint 12 · April 2004: Eyedropping: Version 12 makes a good tool even better... · March 2004: Deadly Sins Of Modern PowerPoint Usage · February 2004: Is the even-numbered curse finally over? · January 2004: Another take on Achieving Absence of Ugliness · November 2003: What can we do it again??--Debut of PowerPoint Live Leaves Unquenchable Thirst with the Host · September 2003: Corel Corp. Has a New Custodian · July 2003: Candor and Contrition at CorelWORLD · June 2003: What a Long, Great Trip It’s Been! · May 2003: The Boat that Corel is Missing · April 2003: No Fooling...Is Corel Breaking Up? · March 2003: The Annual Design-a-Brochure Contest · February 2003: Symbolism is Everything · January 2003: Mania, Our Semi-Annual Pilgrimage to Holland · October 2002: On Creativity, Problem-Solving, and Paper Bags · July 2002: CorelDRAW 11: Surprise, Surprise... · May 2002: The Sound of Silence: What does it mean when a company plays its cards so close to its chest? · April 2002: The Art and Science of Presentation Graphics--Creating for the Screen Has its own Challenges · March 2002: CorelDRAW 11: What kind of personality and attitude should a software program have today? · February 2002: Oy, my aching fingers... · December 2001: Digital Photography · November 2001: Can we say goodbye to the Rolls Royce Mentality? · October 2001: An Unforgettable Week: The drama that unfolded around CorelWORLD · August-September 2001: The Art of Paragraphics: New-age ingredients for success with Corel VENTURA · July 2001: Your Very Own Interface: How to make Corel applications read your mind · June 2001: Fighting the Font Wars: How to stay sane with your sans · May 2001--Turning the Key at Nicholas-Applegate · April 2001--A Modest Proposal for Reviving VENTURA Publisher
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