Microsoft – pull yer finger out!

I’ve blogged regularly about how much I hate Vista, Office 2007, Outlook 2007 … you name it.

 

I thought my friends might appreciate the latest moan.

 

As many of you know, I make presentations for my living, or at least as a large part of it. So I depend upon PowerPoint.

 

This week, I had two critical presentations to make: one to the board of a bank, and one as a plenary session at a European conference.

 

So I diligently prepared the presentations.

 

I spent about 2-3 hours on each, carefully capturing information from the internet and using this to support my contentions.  In particular, my presentation comprises a lot of screen shots from the internet, such as my Facebook homepage, to illustrate points about social networking and Web 2.0.

 

I use “Print Screen” to do this. That way you can cut and paste screen shots into PowerPoint.

 

But PowerPoint 2007 has a problem with this, because it's incompatible with PowerPoint 2003 and before.

 

Even though I carefully save the presentations in compatibility mode as PowerPoint 2003 files, as most conference firms do not have PowerPoint 2007 and hence cannot load these files (see earlier blog), they are still incompatible.

 

First, there’s the annoying change of font sizes of text. But that’s ok. I can live with that.  I can just change that, given 5 minutes to mess about before the show starts.

 

What is worse however, is that the “Print Screen” graphics are completely lost from the slides.  Instead of a nice picture of my Facebook screen or whatever other graphic I placed there, you just get a PowerPoint slide full of mustard-coloured goo.

 

That would be ok if it happened on one slide, but it is on all the slides where I’ve used “Print Screen”, which is fatal for my style of presentation where most slides are pictures and screen shots.

 

I thought I had solved it though because, in Vista, you have a “Snipping Tool”. This is a tool that allows you to use the mouse to grab a piece of the screen and copy it to PowerPoint, Word or other documents.

 

So I started using that instead and it’s great. Far more flexible than “Print Screen”, and my graphics were not being lost when I arrived at tradeshows.

 

However, this was only a temporary fix as this week has been a disaster.

 

I arrived to present to the board of the bank, to find half of my slides would not display on their Office 2003 machine.  A whole presentation of mustard-coloured goo!

 

I manage to blag it, just, and thought it was their Firewall issues ... but then the same happened when I arrived to give the plenary session at the major European conference.  Another presentation full of mustard-coloured goo. 

 

In both cases, instead of using PowerPoint, I had to wing it and just talk.

 

Suffice to say, these were very short, sweaty speeches, with lots of ‘ums’ and ‘ahs’ and stuttering.

 

I should also say that this particular issue is not a Vista issue, but a PowerPoint 2007 issue.  The reason I know this is that the second presentation was prepared on an XP machine with PowerPoint 2007 saved in a PowerPoint 2003 compatible file.

 

In other words, everything Microsoft released as flagship products in 2007 - Vista, Office and Outlook - and all of them have issues.

Comments

[Colin Henderson]

Ouch .... that must have been horrible. Lately for similar reasons, I have begun shipping everything in pdf. (office add on).
Full screen mode is same as ppt presentation mode, with exception of any animations. At a minimum you could take the pdf as a back up plan on a memory stick.
To your point MS just can't be relied on anymore. Backwards compatibility has caught up with them, and its a mess, unless its your machine.

[Chris Skinner]

Thanks Colin

I was going to do that, but the pdf add-in crashed PowerPoint ;-)

[Sean]

Vista? Powerpoint??? Time to get a Mac..