Wayne's Microsoft Blog

PowerPoint 12's Eye Candy

waynekao — Sat, 24 Dec 2005 02:16:00 GMT

Brendan Busch, the Group Program Manager for the PowerPoint and Office graphics group (my group) started up a blog. His first post is a nice overview of our focus areas for PowerPoint "12".

Office and PowerPoint have become almost universally known for ugly, dated graphics. How many times have you seen that rainbow WordArt in some sleazy restaurant?

One of the reasons I've been psyched about PowerPoint "12" ever since we started work on it in mid-2003 is the breathtaking visuals. Just scan through the visuals in Brendan's post above and you can see what a dramatic improvement that is. Though stuff like this has been possible in Photoshop and other products, Our goal in Office to make it easy for anyone to make stuff like this without much hassle.

It's likely in 5 years everyone will be ragging on these new visuals, but in the meantime, they look awesome and it's a huge improvement over previous versions of Office.

Company Store

waynekao — Tue, 27 Apr 2004 18:48:00 GMT

ActiveWin has up some pictures of the Microsoft company store. One of the nice benefits of working at Microsoft is being able to buy software at a nice discount.

I was so in awe of the prices when I first went that I bought all this stuff I never use. I think I still have an unopened mouse somewhere in the back of my closet at home.

It's a common Microsoft myth that employees get the software all for free though.

Nudging

waynekao — Thu, 22 Apr 2004 07:23:00 GMT

Need to move a shape or a picture into an exact position but can't get it positioned just right using the mouse?

Nudging lets you move something a tiny distance so you can get it positioned precisely the way you want.

How to nudge a shape:

Click the shape (the shape, picture, diagram, etc.) once.
On your keyboard, hit an arrow key to move it up, down, left, or right. For more precision, hold down Ctrl while you're hitting the arrow keys and you can move pixel by pixel.

Some exceptions:

This works in PowerPoint, in Excel, for floating shapes in Word, and for shapes inside a Word canvas. It doesn't work on Word shapes that are inline with the text because in those cases Word rather than OfficeArt controls the placement of the shape.
Certain shapes have their positions locked so you won't be able to nudge them. Items inside a chart or diagram come to mind.

Nudging is affected by snapping behavior which you control by going to the Drawing toolbar (View | Toolbars), clicking the Draw menu, then Snap. If you're snapping to the grid, this will affect your nudges, so turn that off to get more precise movement.

There are also Nudge menu items on the Drawing toolbar, but I really don't see the point since if you're going to go to the trouble of clicking that, you might as well just drag the shape directly.

Finally, if you're a Publisher user, you can set the exact nudge distance.

OneNote SP 1

waynekao — Wed, 21 Apr 2004 07:31:00 GMT

A preview of OneNote Service Pack 1 is out on the web. For those who haven't heard, OneNote is a cool new note-taking application released last year as part of Office 2003.

Most service packs only contain bug fixes since companies don't like surprise features and don't want to have to retrain everyone every time they deploy a service pack. So, this Office service pack that includes updates for OneNote and InfoPath, and the upcoming Windows XP SP 2 update, are notable in that they include many brand new features.

Chris Pratley, the Group Program Manager for Word and OneNote, and Peter Rysavy of Tabula PC have excellent blog posts detailing some of the new OneNote features.

A few notable ones that stood out to me:

My favorite audio notes feature works for video now too.
Import notes from the Pocket PC. Essentially lets you bring into OneNote notes you've taken anywhere.
A limited API lets outside programs import info into OneNote. I'll bet we'll be seeing some neat companion programs to OneNote soon.
Encrypted sections for your secret notes.

Random tangent (these tend to come up a lot when I'm blogging): I wonder how the press uses these ultra-high resolution pictures that Microsoft sticks up of our execs. Click the picture of Chris in this interview to see what I mean. I'd be a little freaked if a picture of me like that was put up (heh).

Programming Jokes

waynekao — Tue, 20 Apr 2004 07:11:00 GMT

The only good programming joke I know:

My other car is a cdr.

As you may know, car and cdr are from LISP.

People are getting pretty sick of hearing this one from me though.

What's your favorite programming joke? Know of any good programming joke sites?

As a side note, how do you pronounce "cdr"? "coo-der" or "could-er"?

PowerPoint Viewer Requires Installation?

waynekao — Fri, 16 Apr 2004 10:08:00 GMT

Mike Niedringhaus and I had a short thread yesterday about whether the PowerPoint Viewer really requires installation.

I claimed in my previous post that it didn't. Mike insisted that you had to either install PowerPoint or install the Viewer. Turns out we were both sort of right.

Frontpage Isn't Just For Novices Anymore

waynekao — Thu, 15 Apr 2004 07:27:00 GMT

The last version of Frontpage I used was Frontpage 2.0 back in... 1997? Lisa Wollin, a Microsoft programmer writer, nicely summed up some of my Frontpage complaints on her blog yesterday:

When I write code, I want it to look the way I formatted it to look because I did it ON PURPOSE. When I put in a line break, I want a line break. When I DON’T put in a line break, I DON’T want a line break. Very simple, but FrontPage just didn't get it. This, of course, is a very simplistic view of what previous versions of FrontPage have done to code. I've heard of situations where FrontPage would delete whole portions of code that would then have to be rewritten. Argh!!

Well said. This review brought back some other Frontpage complaints I used to have:

Many Frontpage features require Frontpage Extensions enabled on the server. This usually entailed using Windows NT and IIS, much buggier than Windows 2003 and IIS 6, which today are many times more reliable. NT and IIS weren't mature products and not very stable. And this was before security was on Microsoft's radar. Most web hosts also charged more for these Extensions.
Lots of useless <meta> tags baked into the HTML it generated. Not as fat as Office HTML, but I remember it bothering me a lot.

In short, Frontpage was for novices, and did a lot to annoy anyone who knew HTML.

One of the nice things about working at Microsoft is you can download and try out any software the company makes. So, I've had a chance to play with Frontpage 2003, and I love it. What a difference 7 years makes!

Things to stand out:

The HTML it generates is very clean. In fact, the code is better than what I would write myself. For example, I always forget to close my </p>s.
Frontpage 2003 incorporated Visual Studio's wonderful IntelliSense. IntelliSense is smart code auto-completion. It's very helpful yet doesn't get in the way.
Speedy. I'm probably just as fast in Frontpage as I am in Notepad. The extra stuff doesn't get in the way or slow the program down.
Frontpage estimates download times at various connection speeds. I'm using DSL at home, but I can see right away how long it would take someone to download at 28k or 56k a page I'm authoring.
Very easy to add some canned DHTML effects.

My favorite Frontpage 2003 feature is the new Split View:

Like the name suggests, it splits the window in half. Type code in the top pane and the bottom pane automatically updates to show what you've done. Or be super WYSIWYG in the bottom pane, like drag links and pictures around, and the code in the top pane updates instantly.

It does this all while respecting my changes; no unexpected code changes. Very cool.

I used to be a super "Notepad snob" (or actually a VIM snob), and I still prefer plain text when editing pages with heavy SSI (like my personal site) or pages with other server-side gunk like ASP.NET. But, for pure HTML, I can't imagine using a plain text editor anymore. I use Frontpage to author all these blog posts.

Anyone have other favorite HTML editors? I haven't used anything other than Frontpage or plain text editors to edit HTML in a while.

Presenter View

waynekao — Thu, 15 Apr 2004 06:14:00 GMT

Another question from Superman:

Can I view notes while presenting in PowerPoint?

Answer:

If you have PowerPoint 2002 (a.k.a. PowerPoint XP) or PowerPoint 2003, you can use Presenter View.

While all the audience sees if your normal slides, you the presenter can:

View thumbnails of upcoming slides.
Click a thumbnail to jump to a particular slide quickly.
See your notes.
See the elapsed time.
Black out the screen (though there are other ways to do this).

To set this up, your machine must have support for multiple monitors. Almost every laptop I've ever used has this built-in so you can project on a screen while still viewing stuff on your laptop screen. To do this on a desktop computer though, you probably need two video cards.

You also need to make sure you're not using monitor mirroring:

Right-click your desktop and click Properties.
Choose the Settings tab.
Click the picture of the other monitor.
Check Extend my Windows desktop onto this monitor.

Once that's done:

Launch PowerPoint.
Go to the Slide Show menu | Set Up Show...
In the Multiple Monitors section, check the Show Presenter View checkbox. If this is grayed out, you don't have multiple displays set up correctly.
Then choose which monitor you want to display the slide show on.

Multimedia in PowerPoint

waynekao — Tue, 13 Apr 2004 08:30:00 GMT

Figuring out how PowerPoint plays movies and sounds can be perplexing to say the least.

Andrew May has written two new MSDN articles on the subject:

The first article talks about how PowerPoint plays your multimedia file. There are some nice flow charts that show the process PowerPoint uses to decide which media player to use. Andrew also talks about how PowerPoint picks a codec to play your multimedia.
The second article for VBA programmers has lots of code showing how to insert a media file into a presentation, for instance.

Good stuff.

For more of the basics on how to insert a media file, check out this Sounds and Video tutorial.

Where are the Fill Effects?

waynekao — Mon, 12 Apr 2004 08:34:00 GMT

Why fill your autoshapes with just a boring single color when you can do so much more?

In the picture below,

The top rectangle has a traditional single-color fill. This is the default look that new autoshapes get.
The middle rectangle has a pretty two-color gradient, going diagonally from dark blue to white.
The bottom one is textured with an image.

[image]

It's all very easy to do.

First create your favorite autoshape in Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Publisher, or Frontpage. You can do this either using the Drawing toolbar (View | Toolbars) or through Insert | Picture | AutoShapes.
Double-click the newly-created shape.
Select the Color drop-down.
Choose Fill Effects...

This is another feature that's been around since Office 97. However, I never discovered it until I started working at Microsoft.

Why? I never thought to look for a gradient effect, texture fill, or some other fancy fill effects in a color dropdown. It still makes no sense to me today. I would only go there to change the color of the shape, never looking closely at the choices at the bottom.

This is obviously bad. It's very cool, Microsoft spent many resources on its development, yet I never enjoyed the fruits.

I can understand why the Color dropdown might have been a good place to put Fill Effects. It's a mutually exclusive choice. You have exactly one choice between a colored fill, a gradient, and a texture fill. It makes sense to use UI that chooses between them.

But why label it Color? Why not call it Effect? And this I probably know the answer to. The vast majority of people just want to fill their autoshape with a color, and if it was labeled Effect, it was make this common scenario more confusing.

Design is always hard.