ToolsToo 12.1: Conversation with Gil Segal

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  Gil Segal is the creator of ToolsToo Pro for PowerPoint and an expert technologist with a deep understanding of a wide range of architectures, tools, and technologies and their impact. Gil is always on the lookout for ways to automate manual tasks in any software he uses and has been a PowerPoint power-user since the mid 90’s.

In this conversation, Gil discusses the new version 12.1 of ToolsToo Pro for PowerPoint.

Geetesh: Gil, ToolsToo 12.1.0 introduces smaller but very practical tools such as the new Chain tool for Select All, and the Flip Shape Direction and Flip Slide Direction options. Can you explain these options?

Gil: The new tools in ToolsToo Pro for PowerPoint V12.1.0 are primarily intended to tackle flipping shapes and slides from left-to-right orientation to right-to-left orientation or vice versa. There are a lot of adjustments needed when performing these flips, so we’ll delve into the details of what the tools do.

Flip Shape Direction: This tool does the following for each selected shape:

• Changes text direction from left-to-right to right-to-left or vice versa
• If the shape is a chart:
• Changes plot order of x-axis
• Changes series order
• Changes text direction
• Changes legend location
• If the shape is SmartArt, reverses direction
• If the shape is a table:
• Changes column order
• Changes cell text direction
• Changes animation wipe direction
• Flips gradient direction

Flip Slide Direction: This tool flips slides by calling the Flip Shape Direction tool for each shape on each selected slide. However, instead of changing gradient direction, the Flip Slide Direction tool mirrors the position of each shape on the slide, adjusting motion paths for the new location, and then flips the shapes themselves.

Before Flip Slide Direction

After Flip Slide Direction

Select All: This tool selects all the shapes on the current slide. It can only be used a part of a tool chain – a series of tools invoked with a single click. You can easily build chains by selecting tools in a simple dialog – no programming required – and can run the chain at any time with your current shape selection or iteratively on all selected slides. The Select All chain tool works particularly well with Flip Shape Direction tool, essentially adding a tool that can flip shape direction for all shapes on all selected slides.

Geetesh: Were these additions driven by specific user requests or by patterns you noticed in how people build diagrams and templates in PowerPoint?

Gil: These additions were driven primarily by nearly identical requests from multiple users and the observation that a sizable portion of the ToolsToo Pro for PowerPoint customer base is in countries with right-to-left languages.

Geetesh: ToolsToo has steadily evolved over many versions, with each release addressing small but meaningful PowerPoint workflow challenges. As you continue to refine the add-in beyond version 12.1.0, are there particular areas of the PowerPoint experience where you still see significant opportunities for ToolsToo to improve productivity?

Gil: There are many significant opportunities for ToolsToo to further improve PowerPoint productivity. For example, two areas that could use significant improvement are slide reusability and ease of changing designs.

Everybody is talking about AI these days. It is yet unclear what impact AI will have on the kinds of things ToolsToo does but I can imagine a “fix my slide” feature that will just automatically do alignments, resizing, spacing, make lines horizontal/vertical, make same rounded corners, etc. to just make a slide look good with a single click. As to how much of that Microsoft does vs what is left to tools like ToolsToo Pro for PowerPoint, that is yet to be seen.

Another expansion area for ToolsToo would be a Mac version. ToolsToo has always run on Windows-based PCs only, but I do get a large number of requests for a Mac version.

Lastly but perhaps most importantly, there’s always customer requests. Keep them coming!

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