PowerPoint and Silverlight: a perfect match?

Monday, November 9th, 2009

With its place at the heart of the Microsoft Office suite, PowerPoint is the overwhelmingly dominant presentation software for business. However it has a fundamental flaw – it still doesn’t offer an in-built route for efficient, cross-platform, screen-based web delivery. For a program whose whole purpose is to help users get their message over, this is quite astonishing and unforgivable as we approach 2010.

Microsoft might not provide its own solution but there are plenty of third-party applications which fill the gap such as Adobe’s Captivate and Presenter, the bargain Flair from WildFX and my personal favourite Articulate Presenter. The major embarrassment for Microsoft is that these all rely on the Adobe Flash format.

It’s an embarrassment that is made considerably worse by the fact that Microsoft is currently busily touting its own cross-platform web format, Silverlight, as a direct alternative to Flash. It’s clear that PowerPoint and Silverlight should make a perfect match and native Silverlight export would certainly go a long way to explaining (if not excusing) PowerPoint’s lack of support for Flash.

So where is the ability to convert PowerPoint to Silverlight?

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Microsoft Office Web Apps review: first look

Tuesday, September 22nd, 2009

We’ve been looking forward to getting to grips with the Office Web Apps ever since the first, highly impressive demos at Microsoft’s Professional Developers Conference (PDC) almost a year ago.

But do the limited apps on offer in the technical preview live up to the promise of those well-polished demos? We find out.

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