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Thoughts and impressions of happenings in the world of PowerPoint and presentations, continuously updated since 2003.
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Do you work on PowerPoint for the Mac and receive presentations created in PowerPoint for Windows? And do you hate seeing that graphic metafile conversion dialog box all the time when you are working with such files?
Rob Griffiths from Macworld shares some workarounds here.
Filed Under:
PowerPoint All Versions
Tagged as: Office for Mac, PowerPoint, Rob Griffiths
Comments Off on PowerPoint for Mac: Help with Graphic Metafile Conversion
PowerPoint is almost a synonym for the word presentation these days, and presentation file sizes can be huge. True, you could convert your presentation to another format like Flash SWF, but that brings its own share of problems, like losing the ability to make any changes in the future. That’s where PowerPoint compression software like PPTminimizer steps in. This product lets you optimize multiple presentations into different compression levels without changing the format.
Filed Under:
Add-ins
Tagged as: Add-in, Balesio, PowerPoint
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The timing could not have been better. More than a month ago, we heard that Microsoft would drop support for PDF in the upcoming Office 2007 suite since Adobe might have sued them. And now, Microsoft is headed towards an entirely different direction by embracing the ODF Open Document file format. Granted — comparing PDF and ODF is like the apple and oranges story — but they are both easily distributable file formats.
Microsoft has given in to pressure from several parties including some governments and announced that they are to offer new free open-source software which will make it possible for the Office suite to handle documents in rival formats. The company will develop tools that will enable conversion between its Open XML formats in Office 2007 and OpenDocument. This will allow Word, Excel, and PowerPoint to handle documents in rival technology formats.
Microsoft had been leaving it to ODF supporters to add ODF support to Office 2007, and a group from OpenOffice.org has been working on a plug-in for more than a year. It’s not clear why Microsoft has changed its mind, but it has now organized and funded some third parties to do the job. (The schedule shows that Microsoft wants the plug-in finished by the end of this year, to meet Massachusett’s January deadline, so this may be a factor.).
Today’s announcement is not native support for ODF, but rather a translator, that will let users open and save in the ODF format. That’s important for organizations that want to adopt this standard, such as the state of Massachusetts. But, if the idea is to come up with universal file formats, we’re still not quite convinced this is a big step forward. From a legal standpoint, it’s good that no company owns ODF. But from a practical standpoint, we already have file formats that are used by just about everyone — and those are the Microsoft Office formats, such as DOC and XLS.
Filed Under:
Microsoft Office
Tagged as: Microsoft Office, ODF, PowerPoint 2007, PowerPoint All Versions
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Joel Harband heads Tuval Software Industries, based in Israel.
Their best known product is Speech-Over Studio, a PowerPoint add-in that enables PowerPoint slides to incorporate narrations using automated voices.
In this interview, Joel discusses his product, Speech-Over Studio.
Filed Under:
Interviews
Tagged as: Add-in, Interviews, Joel Harband, Personalities, PowerPoint, Speech-Over
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David Wilson writes, We now have a new war to fight: the war against PowerPoint, spearheaded by Yale political scientist Edward Tufte, an expert in the visual display of information. According to Tufte, PowerPoint’s bulleted lists encourage “generic, superficial, simplistic thinking.”
He adds, But, at the last conference I attended — a typical example — the PowerPoint lectures stuttered on, sometimes alleviated by a blast of animation — Crazy Frog did a turn. Tellingly, the speaker who made the most impact used no bells and whistles at all. She just talked engagingly, peppering her discourse with one-liners and spinning anecdotes.
Read more on the OhMyNews site.
Filed Under:
Thoughts
Tagged as: Death by PowerPoint, Edward Tufte, PowerPoint
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