Friday, July 07, 2006
The New PowerPoint: Off to a Slow Start...
Oh my goodness. The new PowerPoint is pretty...but achingly slow.
For example: I used the PowerPoint Beta to open up a simple 12 slide presentation created in PowerPoint 2003. And by simple, I mean REALLY simple. No animation, no transitions: just small graphics and text only. That's it.
I go to slide one in slide view and it looks fine. I go to slide two...
One one thousand. Two one thousand. Three one thousand.
Eleven seconds later, I was able to get to my next slide.
Painfully, achingly slow.
I didn't have time to mess around. Deadlines were looming. So I switched back to Open Office to edit my presentation. All I wanted to do was update some text -- change the date on slide 1 and a few other words on slide 7. That's it.
The PowerPoint Beta wasn't up to that simple task!
In all fairness, Microsoft warns Beta testers that our experience may be less than perfection. On the Beta download page, MS tells us that the Beta is "not appropriate for production use".
I'll say! Not at that speed!
However, I was determined. After the deadline was over, I booted up my PC, making sure nothing but PowerPoint was running.
This time, things worked fine. No slowness. So maybe it was the fault of my machine, and not the software.
But it's funny how all my other programs -- including Impress -- worked just fine without a fresh re-boot. Curious.
Maybe it was just a fluke. I'll keep plugging away.....things should get better. Right? ¶ 7/07/2006 02:39:00 PM
Oh my goodness. The new PowerPoint is pretty...but achingly slow.
For example: I used the PowerPoint Beta to open up a simple 12 slide presentation created in PowerPoint 2003. And by simple, I mean REALLY simple. No animation, no transitions: just small graphics and text only. That's it.
I go to slide one in slide view and it looks fine. I go to slide two...
One one thousand. Two one thousand. Three one thousand.
Eleven seconds later, I was able to get to my next slide.
Painfully, achingly slow.
I didn't have time to mess around. Deadlines were looming. So I switched back to Open Office to edit my presentation. All I wanted to do was update some text -- change the date on slide 1 and a few other words on slide 7. That's it.
The PowerPoint Beta wasn't up to that simple task!
In all fairness, Microsoft warns Beta testers that our experience may be less than perfection. On the Beta download page, MS tells us that the Beta is "not appropriate for production use".
I'll say! Not at that speed!
However, I was determined. After the deadline was over, I booted up my PC, making sure nothing but PowerPoint was running.
This time, things worked fine. No slowness. So maybe it was the fault of my machine, and not the software.
But it's funny how all my other programs -- including Impress -- worked just fine without a fresh re-boot. Curious.
Maybe it was just a fluke. I'll keep plugging away.....things should get better. Right? ¶ 7/07/2006 02:39:00 PM
