Powerpoint, Flash, and why you shouldn't...
I understand the point of PowerPoint - I really do. Even when criticised for a "pipeline" approach to presenting information. Even when the three-way simultaneous bombardment of visual, textual and aural information is causing mental shutdown in the audience. Even when presentations become so bloated that they become a hindrance to global security... even when drowning in the deepest depths of clip-art hell, I understand its appeal and why it remains so entrenched in corporate life.
What I don't understand, however, is why Microsoft seems content for it to remain such a clunky, buggy, temperamental albatross of an application. Over the past couple of revisions we've seen the introduction of pseudo-3D text styles, nice fades rather than the old-school pixel dissolve, and a larger range of fly-ins than Easyjet. All very lovely (if still lagging somewhat behind Apple's Keynote), but still not even coming close to addressing the real problems.
Take one of our recent experiences as an example. Our client wanted their PowerPoint presentation to offer a little more in the way of visual punch. Aware of the common traps when designing engaging slides, they wondered if we could add some fancy eye-candy using Flash. Surely no problem, right? The software has been around for over a decade now in various forms, and is as widespread as any other document format. Heck, there's even an option to insert a "Flash Document" under the "Insert Object" menu. Except... um... that doesn't work, either crashing the application, displaying an error or settling simply for displaying a Flash icon.
No, instead we need the "Developer" menu (helpfully hidden by default), so we can insert a "Shockwave Flash Object" control. Cue a baffling series of parameters, embedding options, not to mention delving into the code view's Visual Basic editor to hack a script that makes sure the Flash movie rewinds correctly when returning to a slide. Which in turn means your PowerPoint is now loaded with enough macros to terrify even the most liberal of corporate IT lockdowns. When it works, of course... which it might not :-/
Oh, and don't expect any of this to work on any Macs running the slides. Nope, this is ActiveX territory only.
Surely this isn't the future of corporate presentations - locked into slide after slide of the same stale templates simply because PowerPoint is so backwards it can't cope with the inclusion of anything more complex than a sound file?
