Brian Jones: Open XML Formats

Dear Brian,

Just realized that every time when I try to read your blog post, I subconsciously will read "I'm Brian Jone..." first then skip to the actual post.

The reason I did that appears to be the colour and background of your "I'm Brian Jone..." banner is the same as that of your post, and being in bold font, leading me to misread that as the teaser to your blog post. May be it is a me-only problem, but thought that you might want to know.

Thanks.

The sections left/right/main/top/bottom is definitely clearer. Since I am a nitpicker, The top section is a bit big, possibly to accommodate the clustrmap.

The clustrmap at the right hand side turn out to be clinching to the right border on my Firefox browser. I think it should be set to align to the center, if possible.

Finally, it's impossible to make everyone happy. What is important is that it makes you happy.

I hope I'm not too off-base posting this issue here, but I'm struggling to understand why it's so hard to share content between Word 2007 and PowerPoint 2007 when using the new XML-based Office formats. Here's the specific issue that's made me wonder:

I'm creating a series of PowerPoint 2007 presentations based on Word 2007 documents. The Word documents don't include graphics--just text. I have formated the Word documents thus:

Heading 1 style applied to each heading that I want to define as the title for new slide in PowerPoint.

Heading 2 style applied to each subsequent paragraph in the Word document that I want to become text on a slide in PowerPoint.

Heading 1 style for the next slide, and so on.

I can open the Word documents (outlines, really) in PowerPoint, but, alas, PowerPoint won't import more than about 80 slides. Many of the presentations that I'm creating will (or should) contain between 100-150 slides after I

transfer the content from Word to PowerPoint.

I'm puzzled about this limitation in PowerPoint, especially in light of the

new XML-based Office formats. It seems to me that it should be easy to read content from Word (in docx format) and transform that into PowerPoint content (pptx format).

Isn't such cross-application sharing of data one of main reasons for using XML-based formats? Especially given all the talk about sharing linking information from Office to all sorts of other applications (e.g., the Interoperability Track at XML Conference 2007)?

Why can't PowerPoint just consume docx documents (of reasonable size), assuming the Word documents are properly formatted using heading styles?