A Wee Rant About Powerpoint

[wonderwench]

I have spent the past hour trying to edit a stupid diagram in Powerpoint.

Why is this product such a frelling pain in the ass?

Thank you for listening.

 

[SinisterMotives]

I know the feeling. I have 200MB of MS Office bloat on my computer that I only use to read Word documents. I wouldn't even have it if my main customer wasn't such a Microsoft whore. I can write a document in HTML/CSS in a plain text editor in a fraction of the time it takes to get it looking decent in Word.

 

[wonderwench]

I just can't understand why it keeps auto-formatting crap when I have set up options not to do that.

:bleah:

Sadly, PPT is the official communication program at too many companies these days - it is difficult to avoid.

 

[SinisterMotives]

It's a shame. I've seen the source code of Powerpoint files that have been converted to DHTML, and it's absolutely unreal how bloated it is compared to virtually identical hand-coded versions of the same presentations. The same is true of Word and Front Page. I'm no touch typist, but I've never had the slightest urge to use any sort of WYSIWYG editor instead of a text editor.

 

[wonderwench]

It's M$FT's whole marketing startegy. Add more useless features to create a rationale for an upgrade.

I personally like WYSIWIG applications. I just think they could be much better than the M$FT renderings.

 

[SinisterMotives]

Exactly. I like the idea of WYSIWYG programs, but I prefer minimal features. This business of having three or four toolbars and wading through layers of nested menus to access basic features is a load of baloney.

 

[5.10 leader]

It's probably familiarity, but my guys use Ppt a lot for just taht purpose without any problems

It has to be said, though, that complicated diagrams are created outside Ppt and imported.

 

[SinisterMotives]

Can Powerpoint import diagrams from Visio? If so, that may be just the thing WW needs.

 

[5.10 leader]

Haven't used visio for a few years now, but autocad, excel microstation etc work for us.

 

[wonderwench]

My problem yesterday was editing a poorly designed diagram originated by someone with power PPT skills.

I ended up throwing it out and starting all over again.

I still think that M$FT makes horrible boatware.

 

[5.10 leader]

I certainly wouldn't disagree with you. IMO their earlier, less sophisticated packages were superior to the current offerings. Less sophisticated and less powerful maybe, but far easier to use.

 

[SinisterMotives]

Originally posted by 5.10 leader
I certainly wouldn't disagree with you. IMO their earlier, less sophisticated packages were superior to the current offerings. Less sophisticated and less powerful maybe, but far easier to use.

That's the point I was trying to make about all the toolbars, nested menus, and general feature bloat. I despise MS Word for the simple fact that a word processor is supposed to be a word processor, not a desktop publisher, graphics program, Web page editor, etc. Microsoft's approach of trying to make their products be all things to everyone leaves me cold.

 

[5.10 leader]

You are quite right and for that reason I much prefer to use MS Works. Not so feature laden but then I am not into web authoring etc etc. I would prefer to use my hard disk space for other uses besides MS useless, to me, functions.

 

[SinisterMotives]

I don't even use Works anymore. I enjoy programming, so I usually just write little application-specific PHP scripts that do exactly what I want and put them on a Web server. That keeps them off my hard drive altogether.

 

[FloridaSage1]

Go to http://theopencd.sunsite.dk/index.php to download your FREE Office Suite, games, and other applications! Yes,the FREE Astronomy program with ephemeris is there!

 

[FloridaSage1]

Open office runs powerpoint, import/export but keeps it clean... also does Word, in ALL revisions, back to Word 0.2. And, if you simply want to edit, import/export any Word .doc
get abiword from the free http://theopencd.org cdrom ISO.

http://openoffice.org (funded by donations, and, the good will, of more than 20 million Microsoft victims!)

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make that 320 million Microsoft victims!

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[SinisterMotives]