Part 28: Why is powerpoint picture-from-file so braindead?

You may remember in Part 27 when we were adding and subtracting pictures in Powerpoint to resize a document.

Here is the question. A Powerpoint slide is a set size, probably 1024x768. When you want to insert a picture in to a Powerpoint slide, can you think of any conceivable reason why you'd want the image to be any larger than the slide itself? I can't, other than to, say, show a blown up part of a significant piece of a large photo, but in that case I'd probably crop it first. In any case, one would surmise that when inserting a "picture from file" it would downsize it to the size of the Powerpoint slide for easy manipulation.

Ha. Of course not. If you put in a 2000x3000px picture, it opens way over your slide, and screen! You have to scroll to the corner and downsize, and then scroll, and downsize again, and then size it to where you want it, and then move it to where you want it in the slide. Kudos, Microsoft, on making something which should take two or three steps (insert, move, resize if necessary) take eight (insert, scroll, resize, scroll, resize, scroll, resize, move). That's productivity.

Part 27: Oversized powerpoints

A coworker says to me: "I am trying to send a Powerpoint document and it's too big. Any ideas on how to resize it?"

We take a look at it. It is just over 5 mb. So we remove one picture and put in a downsampled one. And it is just over 5 mb. So we check the size of the other picture. It's 2.75 mb. Somewhere, Powerpoint has found an extra 2.25 mb.

So we remove the other picture. And resave. Voila! It is now 108 kb. So we put in the offending picture, and somehow it is now 3 mb and won't bounce.

The question, of course, is where that phantom 2.25 mb came from?

Part 16: Presenting with notes

Setting up projectors is hopeless. I think a clip from an article sums it up well:

A functional Presenter View has been included in Microsoft's PowerPoint 2007 ($95 upgrade at Amazon, for PowerPoint alone). Microsoft finally gave professional speakers software that allows us to have private, online notes synchronized with each of our slides.

But before you go running to install that product you should know three very important things: First, if you are a PowerPoint 2003 user seeking to get this feature you will be saddled with the significant cognitive overhead of having to learn PowerPoint 2007, with very marginal benefits for the vast majority of those who already know and are good at using PowerPoint 2003. PowerPoint/Office's 2007 ribbon interface is quite irritating to learn for PowerPoint 2003 users (there are third party plugins to get the classic 2003 interface but they don't help all that much). Second, remember that Microsoft doesn't allow PowerPoint 2003 and 2007 to exist on the same computer. They force you to install only one or the other on your machine. Third, don't think you can use PowerPoint 2007 on your laptop (for display) and your familiar 2003 on your desktop (to create and edit your presentations) without the following limitation. If you create anything in PowerPoint 2007 on your laptop, even using the 2003 compatible file type, it often won't display properly in PowerPoint 2003, and sometimes vice versa. So you if you install PowerPoint 2007 on your laptop to use its Presenter View you really shouldn't use your laptop to make or edit slides (unacceptable for most of us), or as I said, they won't display properly in PowerPoint 2003 (you'll get random font, size and italics changes when you try to import slides from your 2003 into your 2007 slide decks, lots of fun).

Bolds theirs, italics mine.

Where to start? Well, first it takes Microsoft years to figure out something which should be intuitive: that people want to have notes on the computer and slides on the projector. Trying to set it up in Office is hopeless, even when you are projecting on the computer and the screen it refuses to detect the second display.

Second, the updated version of their software was so braindead and not the least bit backwards compatible, so installing it results in a cascading litany of issues; enough that it is not even worth it.

Third, even this workaround doesn't necessarily work.

I only spent an hour trying to set the computer up to try to do this today. After failing miserably, I sauntered off, glad that it wasn't me making the presentation.