Product Reviews

Depending on where you work in an organisation - and the type of organisation - PowerPoint is either the part of Office you never use or the very essence of the product. As a journalist I've probably used it twice in six years. As first a marketing manager and now a consultant, I use it more than any other application - with the possible exception of Outlook.

But, truth be told, PowerPoint has never really felt like the rest of the Office family, in part because historically it was bolted on to Word and Excel. Developed in California rather than Washington, it often felt a version or two behind the other Office applications.

PowerPoint 2000 still doesn't feel quite like Word, Excel or Access, but it would be unfair to describe it as the odd one out. If one thing remains largely unchanged, it's PowerPoint's position in the Office pecking order. Some of the changes to Word and Excel are pretty revolutionary. But, while some of the improvements to PowerPoint are significant, none are earth shattering.

The biggest change, conceptually, to PowerPoint is also the greatest change visually. Traditionally, firing up PowerPoint has brought you - give or take the odd dialog box asking you to choose a new or existing presentation - a blank slide. Developing your presentation involved switching between the slides, your slide notes and either the outline view or the slide sorter to get an overview of the presentation as it developed.

Now you get a three-pane view with the outline view in the left-hand pane, slide top right and notes below. Each is resizable, allowing you to adjust things to your preferred way of working - or to the stage you're at in the building of the presentation. It's a great idea, and works well. However, I rarely use the outline view and would much prefer the option to replace it in its pane with the slide sorter. Next time, maybe. You can switch the outline view from one side to the other. PowerPoint also benefits greatly from the new SDI approach, which makes switching between multiple presentations much easier.

The bit I'm supposed to get excited about is the HTML

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stuff which is covered in the main part of this feature. Yes, you can save presentations as HTML and, well, you've heard the rest elsewhere. Surprisingly the bit I'm really excited about is tables.

If you read my PowerPoint master class (see issue 54, p204), you'll know I don't recommend complex, spidery charts and tables at which PowerPoint 97 excelled. PowerPoint 2000 uses WordArt elements, not that you need to know that in practice, to effortlessly produce bold, easy to edit and read tables with the greatest of ease. If you're using PowerPoint to produce instructional materials as well as slides, this may be the major improvement.

In all seriousness, of course, the Web features are a big deal. The ability to broadcast presentations, the integration with NetMeeting and the Web discussions - which enable threaded discussions about presentations - provided you have a Web server running the Office Server Extensions, are impressive.

Elsewhere, the really clever thing is the way the HTML features have been implemented. The Publish option on the Save As HTML dialog makes the publishing of a multiframe, multipage, professional-looking Web document the work of a single click.

Clever though they are, I suspect that the collaboration features will take longer to become mainstream than those in Word and Excel. We might increasingly work in teams, but presentations are, for the most part, still face to face.

This makes the addition of the Projector Wizard all the more welcome. If you've ever arrived to make a presentation and spent a frantic half-hour or so trying to configure an unfamiliar projector, this InFocus-designed tool may have been just the thing you were looking for. Newer projectors can even be auto-detected and set up for you.

I heard PowerPoint 2000 criticised recently because it really requires you to have a 19in monitor running at better than 1,024 « 768 to get the best out of it. This was said to be ironic when you consider that most corporate boardrooms still have LCD projectors that struggle with anything over 800 « 600 (or worse).

It's true, up to a point. You do need a high resolution and a big monitor to use the three-pane view effectively. But, as ever, the slide shows themselves are remarkably indifferent about the display they're shown on.

All in all, this is a very competent upgrade - albeit one with some room for further improvement - that concentrates on making the chores of producing a presentation simple, rather than on the flash gimmicks and pointless features and animations that have characterised recent releases. If you already make frequent use of PowerPoint, this is a compelling argument for a move to Office 2000.