Jelle Druyts

I don't like bringing down a product with one sentence (there's a caring team of actual human beings behind every product, you know, with wives and dogs and barbeques in the summer and possibly an unmentioned uncle that's serving time in state prison) but here goes: PowerPoint forgot to nail the basics.

In this post, I'll pretend to know something about product design. Forgive me, and bear with me.

PowerPoint is made for one thing: enabling appealing presentations to capture an audience's attention. That means attending a presentation should be a flawlessly clean experience, where the tool should ultimately be invisible. Unfortunately, as always, reality is quite different from theory.

First of all, I don't ever want to see PowerPoint in 'design mode' when attending a presentation, although it always happens when you switch to a demo or some other application and try to get back. Design-time and runtime should be two very different modes that hardly interfere (just like you don't see Visual Studio .NET everytime you launch or close a deployed .NET application or temporarily switch to another app and back). Sure, you could use PowerPoint Viewer but nobody does, probably because it's just POS (Plain Old Stupid, in light of recent upcomings of POJO, POX, ...) to install a light version of an app you already have. And besides, it doesn't support all features of its big brother, like opening linked or embedded objects.

Second, I've seen too many presenters fumble over the fact that there is no proper way to start a slideshow in PowerPoint. Pressing F5 will start the show from the beginning, but that's pretty unintuitive if you're positioned on another slide in the 'designer'. You can always try to click the 'Slide Show from current slide' icon on the lower left but that's basically just 4 pixels large so if you're a bit nervous on stage you're very likely to click anything but that button.

It may seem like nitpicking to you but I think that's pretty important. I don't want to see even the most experienced presenters get clumsy when trying to use the most visible Office tool in the conference world. Sure, as a professional presenter you should know that the SHIFT-F5 shortcut launches the slideshow from the current slide, CTRL-P switches to the Pen, B and W can be used to toggle your screen to Black or White modes (giving you more room to draw), E erases your scribbling, and CTRL-S gives you a slide overview so you don't have to go back-back-back-back to find that one slide you wanted to show again. (When lost, don't forget you can press F1 in a slideshow to see all options.) But you don't really want both your hands tied to the keyboard when giving a presentation, so two-key shortcuts are bad. Especially if they can't be customized. (IE team, you listening?)

So here's my wishlist for PowerPoint 2006:

• Strictly separate design mode from slideshow mode (the tiny floating 'Resume Slideshow' button won't cut it).
• Make launching the slideshow from the current slide the default.
• Put two non-microscopic, eyecatching buttons on the toolbar, both for launching the slideshow from the start and from the current slide.
• Make all slideshow related shortcuts customizable (i.e. commands to launch the slideshow and the available commands in the slideshow).