Today, I played with the PowerPoint Beta 2007 "Themes" and "Smart Art" features.
Hence: New PowerPoint Lingo for you to Know:
- "Themes" -- sort of like PowerPoint templates, only different (more on this later.)
- "Smart Art" -- a new graphic treatment to eliminate the mass proliferation of the dreaded PowerPoint bullet point.
I opened up an elderly PowerPoint presentation from 1999 -- a short, 15 slide career-day presentation to high school students about being a technical writer. Not the most exciting visual presentation in the world -- just bullet points and old MS clip art, mostly.
Here's what it looked like in 1999 (You can download the whole 1999 PowerPoint file here...a slim grand total of .19 MB):
I opened up this old presentation using the PowerPoint 2007 Beta. Looked exactly the same, natch.
Then, I merely touched "Design" in the new ribbon, scrolled through "themes" and selected a tannish color to complent my old-fashioned clip art graphic. A few seconds later, my red template was wiped out, and the new "theme" was instantly applied throughout my presentation. Take a look:
Now...the brown part happened instantaneously, as did the "shadowy' title. However, I went ahead and clicked on yet another new feature -- "Convert to Smart Art" -- to convert the text into what MS is calling "Smart Art" -- a new graphical treatment for text and bullet points.
Within "Smart Art", you are provided with a dizzying array of graphics to help you eliminate the loathsome bullet point from your PowerPoint presentations. I had 14 more pages of bullet points, so I went ahead and applied a bunch of "Smart Art" options to replace the bullet points.
Next, I did a side by side taste test of sorts: I showed the old PowerPoint presentation my friend Oud, and then forced him (at bullet point?) to look at the new slides.
Now, old Oud is a complete Luddite. He does not own or operate a computer. And he behaves like the small cat in the old Pepe Le Pew cartoons when he encounters PowerPoint -- he acts as if something smells, looks desperate to leave, wriggles, squirms. But today, I was a forceful speaker, and he could not resist my charms.
"Look at this old PowerPoint presentation," I commanded, flipping through the deck.
He looked at the door a few times, squirming.
"Now look at the new PowerPoint," I said.
He stopped squirming.
"Hey," he said. "Visually, it's a lot fresher."
He stopped squirming and looking at the door.
Now, that's about as much flattery for a new piece of software as anyone can expect.
If you want to see every single piece of smart art I applied to "Ye Old PowerPoint Presentation", you can download the New 3.22 MB Technical Writing PowerPoint file here.
Yup, that's right. The new PowerPoint file with themes and smart art ballooned from a svelte .19 MB to an amazingly bloated 3.22 MB.
Ouch. That's "thar she blows" tubby.
Is that the price we need to pay to temporarily keep Oud from looking at the door? Or will MS find a way to reduce bloat before the new PowerPoint hits the shelves?
I will press on...
¶ 7/11/2006 04:34:00 PM
