May 2004

A Personal Wish List
for PowerPoint 12

Users are ready to take this application to the next level; are Microsoft’s developers ready, too?

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:

• They all are self-taught.

• They continue to rely on a fairly narrow skill set, formed from their first few hours of exposure to the program.

• They had no idea before getting some formal training that PowerPoint could be used to create the kind of work normally associated with Macromedia Flash and Adobe Premiere.

• Once those floodgates opened, their appetites for driving PowerPoint harder was insatiable.

• And in a very short order, they were already encountering limitations in the software’s abilities.

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 ago 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.

Better Object Management

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.

Better Format Painting

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:

• Fade In | After Previous | Speed set to Slow

• Wipe Right | On Click | Speed set to Fast

• Motion Path Right | With With Previous | Speed set to 5 seconds

• Motion Path simultaneous to a 150% Grow

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.

Sound Control

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.

Give Us a Real Timeline

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.

Control Over Keystrokes

We have keyboard envy of Word users, because they can customize their keystroke assignments and we cannot.

Script Support for Animation

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.

Better Zooming

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 suggest that Microsoft make these changes, visit
Microsoft’s Product Feedback page.

To learn the product better, secure your seat now for PowerPoint Live.