PowerPoint 2010: Unlimited Windows
Keeping secrets
It’s one of the hardest things about working on great products. A team of talented, proud engineers must stay mum about what’s underway until very late in the development cycle. But then finally we get to show you that we are, indeed, listening.
No surprise that this aspect of our jobs should show up in the PowerPoint team’s blog. But this time I get to call back to a blog entry I made last year and update you on a few things. Over a year ago, in response to a common user question, I wrote a blog entry called It's a Multi-Screen World. Users commonly ask How do I show two presentations at once, like I can in Microsoft Word? The blog showed techniques for taking advantage of larger display areas to view two or more presentations at once.
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| | Illustration from the April 2008 blog entry showing a PowerPoint 2007 MDI window with two
presentations arranged for simultaneous use. | |
Secrets revealed
At the same time as that post, we were working on freeing the PowerPoint document windows from their multiple-document interface, or MDI, containing window. To be honest, we’d already done it. And now PowerPoint 2010 users will find their document windows much easier, much more intuitive to use.
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| | PowerPoint 2010 with two presentations open for editing. | |
Single-Document Interface, or SDI, windows display a separate, individually controlled window for each presentation you have open. There are benefits here that might not be immediately obvious. SDI windows make it easier to copy content between presentations, and are simply easier to use when you’re referencing information in presentations for use in another document.
What may not be obvious here is how this change to PowerPoint windows will make some other new functionality sparkle even more, but we’ll cover that soon in another post.
Ric Bretschneider
Senior Program Manager, Microsoft Office PowerPoint
July 17, 2009
