Haven’t Upgraded to PowerPoint 2007 Yet But Are Thinking About It?
By Robert Lane www.aspirecommunications.com
Even though PowerPoint 2007 has been out for almost two years now, perhaps you still are on a 2003 platform and just now are thinking about upgrading. Or maybe your company plans to upgrade soon and you are curious about what that might mean to your relational presentation activities. In either case, here’s the scoop on PowerPoint 2007, the good, the bad, and the indifferent.
The Indifferent: We’ll start with all that you wish would have changed, but that hasn’t changed at all. Hyperlinks are still the same in all respects—nothing improved and nothing broken. You still (unbelievably) have to put the little space in the screen tip to eliminate the link path display. You still have to use the Insert Hyperlink dialogue box—no drag and drop linking yet. Custom Shows functionality is exactly the same in 2007, and as antiquated as ever. With exception of some improved (or otherwise cosmetic) functionality, working with animations, video, and audio is identical.
The Bad: Actually, there’s not too much to complain about. Some aspects of working with shapes and pictures could be better designed but are tolerable as is. The one main annoyance also has a bright side. PowerPoint 2007 automatically compresses your files when you save, using zip compression. This is good in the sense that it greatly reduces your file size, taking up less space on your hard drive and resulting in files that are easier to e-mail. It’s bad in that 2007 files take longer to open via hyperlink. The file must be unzipped before it displays, resulting in an extra second or two of black slide delay each time you click a link. Such a delay is not the end of the world but is annoying. 2007’s performance also is a little sluggish, especially on older computers (even more than a couple years old). Slides sometimes take a moment to display even when regularly scrolling through a linear show. Plus, 2007 linking is not as stable as in former versions. Some sporadic link corruption issues have arisen in our work, problems we’ve never seen before. Hopefully PowerPoint designers are tackling these issues with all due haste.
The Good: Overall, though, the good with PowerPoint 2007 far outweighs the bad. The automatic compression features really do help keep file sizes manageable, especially when including many pictures in long, linear shows. The graphics capabilities are fabulous. You now can add special effects to pictures and shapes directly in PowerPoint, in ways that used to be possible only in Photoshop. This functionality still would benefit from improvements but is, nevertheless, greatly enhanced over 2003. We use gradients, bevels, shadows, soft edges, reflections, and glows with abandon. Formatting options for charts, tables, and diagrams have greatly improved as well. Designers who enjoy creating attractive slide displays will be delighted with all the expanded options.
Filed under: Uncategorized on October 11th, 2008
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