Articles by Joy

One of our clients uses a lot of Microsoft PowerPoint (PPT) presentations that need to be updated by their sales force, which are then sent to us to tidy up and put on brand. For several years this has been done on PPT 2004 on a Mac, and reviewed on a PC depending on the complexity of the graphics.

When PPT 2008 for the Mac was released, we toyed with the idea of using it as our standard. But once we got a little more familiar with it, we felt that the new version does little more than stir up the user interface a bit. There may be some new bells and whistles, but for the power user nothing much was improved in the way of functionality or efficiency.

One function that I was hoping would be improved was the animation interface. This component has always been inferior on the Mac compared with the PC version. On the PC, you can change elements of an animated group without ungrouping and subsequently losing the animation. But this isn’t possible on the Mac, even in the newest release. To change just one item in a group, you have to ungroup it and lose any animation effect the group had. If there are several animations, it’s quite time consuming to recreate them all.

This inefficiency is compounded (but just on the Mac!) by the fact that animations have to be done in a dialog box rather than a palette. So as you compare old and new versions of the animation to recreate it, you must continually open and close the dialog box to make alterations to the animation sequence, options and/or effects. If we had a palette that always stays open for edits, it would be a huge time saver.

Another area that’s a problem is text wraps in a bulleted list. When we opened existing files in Mac PPT 2008, extra spaces would sometimes appear at the beginning of random lines. This discussion thread illustrates the problem and a Microsoft representative acknowledges that it’s a known issue.

With these issues we wondered if it would be better to switch to PPT 2007 for the PC. This version is supposedly the equivalent of 2008 for Mac, but its interface is radically different. The new release seems odd and harder to use. That alone would not keep us from using it, but we’ve also encountered glitches that prevent us from relying on it. Again, an example is text that’s incorrectly spaced and aligned in presentations that were created in previous versions. Because of the large number of older presentations we work with, we weren’t comfortable with this uncertainty.

Other wildcards are the process for adding new colors is glitchy, and gradients created in earlier versions may reverse direction in 2007 for PC. In addition, there are issues with using multiple master slides – if you have a large number of people (like a sales force) that needs to be able to apply master slide layouts, they must be on this version to access them.

So for now, we’ll just stick with our tried and true process of editing in PPT 2004 for the Mac and reviewing on the PPT 2003 and 2007 on the PC. If you have expererienced any of this yourself and have found a good solution, let me know!

In September I attended the Idea Festival in Louisville, KY where I soaked up creative juices from the wide variety of speakers. (You can get a flavor for some of the sessions here.)

Here are some insights I gleaned from a few of the presentations:

• Ideas need time to take shape. During audience Q&A Shawn Frayne, one of the finalists for the Curry Stone Design Prize, described how he came up with the idea for a device that captures wind energy in a ground breaking way. It’s a problem he had pondered since he was young … he would watch the wind move grass and think about new ways wind power could be harvested. There was no single “A-ha!” moment, but eventually budgetary and production constraints were important in leading him to develop the new technology. Frayne’s view is that “harder problems make for better inventions.”

• Art makes the biggest impact and is most memorable when it pushes the envelope. Jonah Lehrer’s presentation (based on his book Proust Was a Neuroscientist), was very interesting to me as a designer and artist. He talked about how art makes the biggest impact and is most memorable when it pushes the envelope … just enough to challenge our brains into making the effort to understand it. Since we are usually drawn to the familiar, it’s up to artists (and I think creative thinkers in any field) to expand other’s horizons.

• Innovation requires a lot of quirky individuals. Amy Chua argued that hyperpowers are able to develop because of their relative tolerance of diversity. She theorizes that only by allowing a variety of people to live and work in a society can innovation occur, allowing the state to flourish (i.e., rule the world). This is a leap, but I saw a connection between Chua’s theories and my creative work at Bing. (The diversity of ideas part, not the taking over the world part, alas.) On large or complex projects, it takes many of us contributing our unique ideas and expertise to help determine the best solution to the problem. Usually it’s through the interplay of each of our opinions, experience and information that we end up with a solution beyond what one could envision alone.