I would tell them that most of their bundled themes are not great. I do like the ones bundled with Office 2007 better though because they are not as busy.

If they must have a default slide layout, make it the one that imports images, etc.

Garr,

on powerpoint notes it would be nice to be able to edit the font size, format and layout on the notes box. Any formatting shows only on printed version, not on the notes box when you prepare it.

Inserting pictures is a pain, since ppt always triest to guess what is my preferred size (and quite often guesses wrong)

From formatting pictures there is one important feature missing. There is no easy way to make the size of the picture the same as the slide size. First you need to make it close enough on the formatting box, then drag it to match.

I think I could go on and on, but still I manage with powerpoint - after years of curious practice. Normally there is always a way to do the trick. You just have to find it. MS normally also guesses what I try to do and most often guesses wrong. So I would prefer them to turn off all auto formatting.

Regards,

Samurai

I wonder if there were a way they could include examples of great presentations using Powerpoint in interesting ways... A help link that points to a blog by an interesting Microsoft-er that highlights recent presentations that use Powerpoint well?

I made a presentation to a group of people who seem to like bullet points / text / data on every slide (Academia, anyone?). I read your book and applied visual techniques as best as I could and I used Powerpoint 2003.

After the presentation, I wanted to give my audience a printed version of my slides along with the associated notes to take away. But there was only one "Notes option" while printing, which meant I had to print multiple copies of each of the 25 slides to have the notes on it.

I decided to save the earth and gave them a consolidated word doc instead! At this point I realized how useful it would be to have a printing option for notes, similar to the handout option (with 3 slides per page) and have the notes by the side instead of those blank lines.

Garr,

Please pass on to the folks at Microsoft that PPT is just a tool... like a hammer. We don't blame the hammer if our house is badly built. Nor should we blame PPT if our communications fall down. But like any other tool, PPT shouldn't be used every single time we need to build an idea. We need more in our toolkit.

During my work as a consultant at Microsoft, I've seen that up in Redmond they're no better nor worse than any other corporation in overusing PPT. My suggestion: propose that whenever they think about sharing an idea, spend a moment thinking about some way OTHER than PPT to convey it. Tell a simple story, sketch a basic picture, walk your audience step-by-step through an equation; there are lots of options.

We *must* not get caught up in the laziness of business thinking that comes with the ease of using PowerPoint. Relying on that one tool exclusively is really starting to make our brains into 8.5 x 11" rectangles. Our brains are squishy for a reason. Please ask the Microsoft folks to start thinking about what comes after PPT. If *they're* not thinking about it, then we really should be worried.

- Dan

I'd tell Microsoft to copy Keynote and then improve that. Powerpoint is not tactile enough for me and not freeform enough. I don't want software imposing its will upon me, I want to be able to express my idea in as few mouse-clicks and configuration items as possible. I want a canvas with typesetting and easy object embedding which is well presented to me and rarely shows the hourglass. Microsoft already lost me as a customer though, they have to do better than Keynote to win me back.

It would be nice for PowerPoint to support single sourcing.

You could have a "bucket" of re-usable slides and slide objects. If you update a slide, then all slides that use it would be updated.

The benefits - presentations would be more consistent, quicker to put together and maintainable.

Author-it achieves this by generating HTML and XML based slides, but it would be nice if PowerPoint could do that too.

Hi Garr,

I happen to think PowerPoint is a wonderful tool for presenting. However, people use PowerPoint in at least two other ways that I am aware of:

1. As a thinking tool, and
2. To create stand-alone documents for sharing, either by email or online.

I think PowerPoint can be -- and is -- highly valuable as a knowledge management tool, and what I'd like to see is some development in these areas that are outside the realm of the presenter on the stage.

Consider the following: It's not easy to use PowerPoint like this:

1. First, to think through your ideas. I use index cards for this. PowerPoint could improve its usefulness as a thinking tool by improving the interface for sketching (Useful for those of us with tablet PC's), and offering more options for organizing slides. The slide-sorter mode is helpful, but with index cards I can stack them or arrange them in columns, like cards in a solitaire game. Why can't I do things like this in PowerPoint?

2. Second, to present your ideas. PowerPoint could be improved here but I think it does this pretty well. I use PowerPoint for this.

3. Third, to share your ideas after you have presented, in some kind of stand-alone format. I use PowerPoint for this also, but in order to create a meaningful stand-alone document I have to start over. It would be nice if I could make one document that serves both purposes, and then change the layout with the flip of a switch.

I wish you luck in your conversation with Microsoft.

Hi Garr,

Thanks for the great blog, and good luck with MS, I just wanted to voice a few suggestions:

Text:
Could we please have some simple clean effects to edit the text beyond the standard stuff. A little along the lines of the photoshop offerings would be nice, like, anti-aliasing text, sharpening, simple backdrops and basic shading. It would help with making clean easy to read slides.

Video:
Maybe I am not good enough with the tool, but embedding video on a slide always causes problems, especially if we want text, and then if it works, having the text change then is pretty much impossible. This makes it very hard to use videos for anything useful, or for editing and adding text to videos.

In the same vein, with so many videos only available on-line an intuitive (and working) way of allowing on-line video to be embedded would be very helpful, and this should be extended to include services like Google Earth and similar, as the films and images of the globe spinning and focusing on an area would be great to have available. Then the possibility for having text on top of this, would be great too.

A good idea?
Writing this down, it occurs to me that one might suggest a way of implementing this really easily, which would be to make it possible to have layers on a slide (as in photoshop), where each succesive layer is transparent, and one can choose which layers will react to mouse/pointer clicks. That might be a seemless way of allowing 2D animation and applications to run smoothly.

I hope that makes sense, Best Regards
Benjamin

Picking up an idea from zenator up the screen, how about making it easy to make 'screencasts'?

I'd like to be able to jack a microphone in to my laptop, press F5, and speak through my slides, and then save a video (wmv format would be fine) of the 'screencast' at YouTube like resolution and e-mail it to students who missed the session.

I can do that in KeyNote, but my colleagues at College are not going to buy Macs anytime soon.

Hi,

I use ppt as a tool, so the work I am doing will dictate if I use it or not.

We keep blaming ppt for the problems, it is the limitations of the designer that must be addressed, thankfully as your site etc does.

Use ppt as one of the tools from your presentation palette, the real issue is to understand what you are doing as a designer of presentations and introducing more tools to your palette.

Garr, you have some great suggestions above (especially re: handouts, which I echo), but my biggest peeve with PPT is that I can never start with a blank slide. It's always wanting to throw default text boxes and junk in there. I assume I can set a default template with this gone, but it is probably the reason we see the same boring-looking decks time and again.

Better multimedia support. I can't display hi-res videos or use a slide bar, speed control, etc. Videos can't be cropped. It's not possible to put an object in front of a video and so on. Putting a flash animation on a slide is always tremendously unpractical.

Congratulations for the blog, absolutely awesome, so as the book!!

I'll echo the comments about Presenter View. I still use Office 2003, so I don't know if these issues have been improved in the latest version. Overall, the function of the presenter view is cumbersome.

1. Like the earlier commenter, I have trouble with the remote in presenter view--the back button acts like the forward button.

2. It is very difficult to scroll down through the notes, and any formatting of the notes is lost. (I personally like to underline key words for quick sight recognition.) I've also had problems with moving between slides and ending up at the end of the notes on that slide, rather than the start. Because there's no formatting, it is hard to see where I am.

3. It would be useful to see more of the notes with a smaller slide image (as mentioned above).

4. The timer starts as soon as presenter view starts, but I often have the presentation open before people arrive. It would be more useful to be able to start the timer when I'm ready for it to start.

The main reason I use the presenter view is to make it easier to jump ahead or back to a slide if necessary. Otherwise, the other functions end up being useless, and the inability to go backwards using my remote is the final straw.

Thanks, Garr, for asking for our input. I love Presentation Zen and have recommended both the blog and the book enthusiastically!

I would like non-destructive grouping (maintaining animations). I would like a layer function, without grouping. This would allow hassle free selection of buried objects, among other things. I would also like to be able to set a rotation point on objects, rather than the current mathematical centre being used. As you see, most things I would like relate to animating elements. It would be nice to be able to do more complex animations within the program rather than turning to an outside app like flash.

This is an article I wrote last year, in September about PPT2007. I just copied/pasted it, so it's the real spontaneous original one.
Here it goes:

Warning: this post contains explicit details of my relationship my with soon-to-be ex.

I heart PowerPoint. I started using it when I was a student, I think around 1997. At that time most people outside the business world didn’t know it existed.

At first I was shy, just writing a couple of key words on a few slides. Then I started falling in love and I wanted more - that’s how girls are. I got a glimpse of all its nice features: the transition effects, the sounds, even the programmed buttons and hyperlinks. We had passion. PowerPoint came along with me when I presented my thesis to the jury in college, and we did a great impression.

Then came corporate world, and I must say, if I am good at one thing in business, it is making presentation. That was so easy, with my beloved PowerPoint.
Everyone knew about us and our great relationship.
Event at home, when I switched to Mac 4 years ago, I couldn’t leave PowerPoint for Keynote. Keynote was nice, but it was just a fling.

Of course, people (hum, softwares) change, and PowerPoint was getting older, more mature, a bit different, but always the same old one I had always known.
Until recently. Maybe it’s mid-life crisis, but that much change came unexpected to me. I changed jobs in April, got a new PC, and there it was: PowerPoint 2007, all brand new.

At first I got curious about its new features: new templates that look young and professional. New styles and color sets.
But then came hell. I got used to the “office button” because it’s on every Office program and I had to deal with it. Still, I don’t like it much.
That ribbon idea, it got me confused. Where, oh where were my buttons and menus??
And then came the worse: things that I really liked in PowerPoint, things that were making my life easy, were gone. The drawing bar, gone. The selection pointer, gone. When I want to draw 10 lines, I need to go to the insert/shapes menu and click on the line button and draw ONE line and DO IT ALL AGAIN. That makes me crazy.

And I haven’t even tried to apply effects to objects or transitions between slides, yet.
I am telling you, PowerPoint and I, it’s over.
Thing is, we are going to have to keep on living together for a little while. I can’t pay the rent/do my job on my own without it. But I'll be leaving it as soon as I can.

I'd really like to see some feature uniformity between Mac and Windows versions. I was recently reading "Why most powerpoint presentations SUCK (and what you can do about it)" and wanted to try some of the tricks on my Mac. Sadly, some of the features do not appear on the Mac.

On top of that, I would like to have confidence that, once I have created a slide deck on my Mac, that when I put it on a Windows box that it will play as expected. Image formats, fonts, effects - I cannot rust any of them.

Finally, make it easier to import quality graphics into PowerPoint. Many plots that I create in third-party (in this case, mainly free, Unix heritage) applications simply get blurry in PowerPoint. A postscript (NOT .eps) file should be simple. PDF should be simple. Any image with an open specification should work. They don't.

Thanks everyone for your comments. Here are some photos from yesterday:

http://snipurl.com/2ea56

Your comments were very useful. Arigatou! -g

Hi Garr,

I'm going to go way out on a limb here. Let's pretend that they are at the beginning all over again. What would they actually do, if they had a chance to start clean and fresh? If I was in their shoes, I'd honestly take the source code for PowerPoint and make sure that it is never used again. It's a tool from a bygone era. It truly is like AM radio in a world of digital surround sound. Start over, from the beginning. No preconceived notions, no limitations. And the beauty is we've really learned one lesson from the millions of PPT presentations. It's not about the PowerPoint. It's the quality of the presentation, not the quality of the slides, that matters. So for the new (as yet unnamed) product, focus on story telling, communication, listening, building relationships, making connections. The world does not need another iteration of PowerPoint. It needs people that can communicate effectively, in ways that are as far above what PPT can do as digital surround sound is above AM radio.

So my charge to them would be to start fresh, to start over. Focus on what's really and actually important in a presentation, in a way that is fresh, unique, and really takes very well educated risks that can pay huge dividends. Don't improve on Keynote, instead start over, from scratch, and make the first new business killer app for the start of the 21st century.

Just my 2¢

Russ Conte

It'd be great if powerpoint had cue cards for the presenter's laptop only, while the audience viewing the presentation on the projector could only see the slides themselves.

This was one of the fantastic suggestions in Seth's Godin's guide to better powerpoint.

I would support the handouts issue, but also like the ideas of screencasts. I know Authorslide works with ppt to Ipod.

Further to the above, the young students I teach (11-13) genuinely like ppt. Have MS ever thought on a basic versions, a young leaners User interface? For example Studywiz uses two UIs, one for Primary and one Secondary Schools? Have MS ever consider changing the UI to suit the user?

hi garr!

since my work involves advertising, my biggest pet peeve is how powerpoint handles video. i wish it could handle more formats in higher resolutions. being able to layer on top of video (text and graphics) while it plays would be nice as well.

also annoying is how it handles font embedding - on powerpoint for the mac it's not possible at all. on the pc you're limited to true-type fonts. i really wish they could allow open-type font embedding.

powerpoint is a great tool that makes it very easy to share ideas and media. giving us better embedding options would make it even greater.

Powerpoint 2007 is great as it is. I have never used Keynote, which might even be better, but Powerpoint 2007 is definitely a very usable tool. I think the problem is rather the way how people use it.

Some things that are still lacking a bit:
- Slide transitions (could be nicer and more smooth)
- Motion paths sometimes move around in funny ways when you move the objects they are connected to

I am a college instructor, and I am in the process of starting to rebuild every PP to be a) simpler, and b) to use action buttons to make it easier to loop through different topics as they come up in our discussion.

If Microsoft could make it EASY to develop presentations with action buttons, like a way to insert a 5-slide loop, or several templates that you could start with, that would be awesome for creating more interactive presentations.

I also think they should be incorporating mindmaps (like what you can do with Mindomo) into their presentation technologies.