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Thoughts and impressions of happenings in the world of PowerPoint and presentations, continuously updated since 2003.
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PowerPoint and Presenting Notes
PowerPoint and Presenting Glossary
The world of interactive slide shows, now a feature of many business seminars, could soon be allowed in Federal Parliament.
A report tabled in the House of Representatives today suggested Parliament should consider allowing politicians to use computer software such as Microsoft’s PowerPoint program to illustrate their speeches.
Read more on the Fairfax Digital site.
Filed Under:
Case Studies
Tagged as: Case Studies, PowerPoint
Patrick Schmid is a Microsoft OneNote MVP who works with several other Microsoft Office programs including PowerPoint. He can be frequently found in the public newsgroups for Microsoft Office products. At other times, he fine-tunes and works on his RibbonCustomizer product, about which he explains more in this conversation.
Geetesh: Tell us more about yourself and RibbonCustomizer. How did this product evolve?
Patrick: I am a Ph.D. student in computer science. Through pure luck, I made it into the Office 2007 Technical Beta, which began in November 2005. Customizing the ribbon became a much-discussed topic almost right away with beta testers complaining that it wasn’t possible and Microsoft pointing to this new XML-based language called RibbonX. Eventually, I decided to give RibbonX a chance. The first add-in I wrote simply loaded RibbonX into an Office program. I made it available to all beta testers, but it was barely used. The main reason was that people just didn’t want to deal with RibbonX. Why? In Office 2003, we have a user interface that allows us to customize everything we wanted, whereas in 2007, we need to learn the XML-based language RibbonX. I would bet that most of your readers probably don’t want to know about RibbonX, because all they probably care about is being able to customize the Ribbon.
For the second beta release (Beta 1 Technical Refresh), I decided to write a new add-in that featured some user interface in addition to the ability to load RibbonX. That taught me RibbonX pretty well, but it also presented a major struggle with it. If you just read the Microsoft documentation, you get the impression that you can do more than the product actually allows you to do. I discovered those things as I was writing the second add-in, and the code ended up being a mess. With the release of Beta 2, I started over a third time. The result of that is RibbonCustomizer today. Microsoft finished making changes to RibbonX with the last beta release in September 2006, Beta 2 Technical Refresh. In October, I became a OneNote MVP and with that access to better development tools. I took advantage of that and incorporated everything that was only possible into the first release version of RibbonCustomizer.
RibbonCustomizer is far from done. One feature, namely the ability to add individual commands to the Ribbon, is probably the most requested one and I will be starting the design work for it soon. Beyond that, I still have a very long list of things that I would like to realize in RibbonCustomizer.
Geetesh: What do you think about Office 2007’s new ribbon-based interface?
Patrick: I love it. I have been working exclusively with Office 2007 since November 2005, and I would not want to go back to menus and toolbars. With the Ribbon UI, I get things done faster and better. Also, I have been using features that I never even thought of using in earlier versions. The major downside of the Ribbon UI though is its focus on beginner and intermediate users. Power users simply feel left out. That’s where RibbonCustomizer comes in. If I don’t like something on the Ribbon, I change it.
The views and opinions expressed in this blog post or content are those of the authors or the interviewees and do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of any other agency, organization, employer, or company.
Filed Under:
Guest Posts
Tagged as: Add-in, Guest Post, Microsoft Office, Patrick Schmid, PowerPoint 2007
A vote to make Microsoft Office document formats an international standard was approved on Thursday, according to a Microsoft representative.
At the general assembly of Ecma International in Zurich, Switzerland, Microsoft’s Office Open XML–a set of specifications detailing the document formats in Microsoft’s office–was certified as a standard.
Read more on the ZDNet Asia site.
Filed Under:
Microsoft Office
Tagged as: Microsoft Office, ODF, OpenXML
Microsoft’s Mac Business Unit announced Tuesday that their timetable has them releasing file converters to read Office 2007 file formats in older Mac versions of Office sometime this Spring, probably late March/early April.
While this is a little later than most users would like, given that Office will be on store shelves the end of January, the announcement was in response to some alarmist articles suggesting that Mac Office users were being screwed, when these file converters had been promised months ago.
Read more on the WebProNews site.
Filed Under:
Thoughts
Tagged as: Office 2007, Office for Mac, PowerPoint 2007
It’s true that the biggest new feature in Office 2007 is the interface and thus usability improvements. The new ribbon tabs change dynamically depending upon what task you are doing — yet unlike the old toolbars of pre-Office 2007 applications, there’s no way you can create a new ribbon tab in PowerPoint 2007.
That’s not entirely true though since you can actually create and edit the ribbon tabs in PowerPoint and other Office 2007 applications using a third-party add-in called RibbonCustomizer.
Read the Indezine review of RibbonCustomizer.
Filed Under:
Add-ins
Tagged as: Add-in, Microsoft Office, Office 2007, Patrick Schmid, PowerPoint 2007, Review
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