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.

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:

1. Click the shape (the shape, picture, diagram, etc.) once.
2. 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.

The only good programming joke I know:

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"?

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:

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.

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:

1. 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.
2. The second article for VBA programmers has lots of code showing how to insert a media file into a presentation, for instance.

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

Superman asked me yesterday:

The answer is a master slide.

First let's create a master with the style we want:

1. Launch PowerPoint. Create a new presentation or open an existing presentation.
2. Go to the View menu | Master | Slide Master.
3. Since we don't want this applied to every existing slide in the presentation, let's create a new Slide Master. Insert menu | New Slide Master.
4. On this new Slide Master, change the fonts for the title and body to Comic Sans MS or some other font. Or do other stuff like changing the slide background or inserting some autoshapes.
5. Close out of master editing by clicking the big Close Master View button.  Or if you don't see that, try View | Normal. You should be back to your regularly scheduled presentation.

Now to apply that formatting to some actual slides:

1. Select the slide or slides from the list of slides on the left.
2. Open up the Slide Design task pane by going to the Format menu | Slide Design. In the Used in This Presentation section at the top, you should see a mini picture of the master slide you created earlier.
3. Click the mini picture and the formatting on that master slide will be applied to the slides you selected. The fonts on these slides should change to Comic Sans MS.

Easy enough. Just go back to the master (View menu | Master | Slide Master), edit the master. All the slides that use that master will automatically update to the new formatting.

One other minor note. PowerPoint 2002 (a.k.a. PowerPoint XP) was the first version to introduce multiple masters, a highly requested feature. In earlier versions you can only have one master for the entire presentation, which can make this process a little more difficult if you had several different sets of formatting you wanted to apply.

If you have to share your presentation with people using earlier versions of PowerPoint that don't support multiple masters, you can improve compatibility by disabling multiple masters so you can be sure the earlier version can read your presentation: Tools menu | Options | Edit tab | Disable new features section.

If you have objects like shapes or pictures in your Word document, and then move the document text around, it may not be clear why your objects are repositioned the way they are.

In Word, there are two primary ways objects can be positioned.

• In line with the text - The object is positioned just like normal text is positioned. If you insert text in front of the object, it moves forward just like the rest of the text does.
• Floating - The object is "anchored" somewhere and moves when the thing to which it's anchored moves. If the thing to which the object's anchored is deleted, the object gets deleted too.

To find out which of the two a particular object uses:

1. Double-click the object to bring up up a dialog.
2. Click the Layout tab.
3. In the Wrapping Style section, if the leftmost dog picture is selected (In line with text), the object uses inline positioning. Otherwise it's floating.

If you've got something inline, positioning it easy. Just move it around like you move around text.

If it's floating, the easiest way to figure out its positioning is to display the object's anchor:

1. Switch to Print Layout view (View menu | Print Layout).
2. Click the ¶ button on the Standard toolbar to show the document formatting.
3. Now, click an object like a shape or an image. If the object's floating, you'll see a little anchor icon appear that indicates where the object is anchored.

[image]

• The yellow circle uses floating positioning.
• At the top, notice that I have the ¶ button on the toolbar selected.
• I clicked the yellow circle shape and the little anchor icon in the left margin appeared.
• When the text near the anchor is moved, the yellow circle moves too.
• If I delete text right next to the anchor, the circle is deleted too.
• I can drag the anchor icon around to specify exactly where I want my circle anchored.
• The blue rectangle is positioned inline. It's positioned just like any other Word text, in this case after "The quick br" and before "own fox. Since it's inline, I can position the blue rectangle just like I position normal Word text.