Wayne's Microsoft Blog

PowerPoint 12's Eye Candy

2005-12-24T02:16:00Z

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

2004-04-27T18:48:00Z

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

2004-04-22T07:23:00Z

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

2004-04-21T07:31:00Z

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

2004-04-20T07:11:00Z

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?

2004-04-16T10:08:00Z

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

2004-04-15T07:27:00Z

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

2004-04-15T06:14:00Z

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

2004-04-13T08:30:00Z

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?

2004-04-12T08:34:00Z

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.

Slide Master

2004-04-09T08:49:00Z

Superman asked me yesterday:

In PowerPoint, I have a bunch of slides and I want to apply one font to all their titles and another font to all their body text. How do I do this without having to edit all these slides one by one?

The answer is a master slide.

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

Launch PowerPoint. Create a new presentation or open an existing presentation.
Go to the View menu | Master | Slide Master.
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.
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.
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:

Select the slide or slides from the list of slides on the left.
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.
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.

Oops, I changed my mind. Instead of Comic Sans MS I actually wanted to use Arial.

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.

Is Washington better than California?

2004-04-07T07:34:00Z

Someone I know is considering moving up to the Seattle area and asked me about my Washington experience. Other friends of mine who are considering Microsoft actually ask me this a lot so I thought I'd write an entry about it.

Here are some general impressions after my summer internship in Redmond and after talking to some Washington people, though keep in mind I've lived in California over 20 years and in Washington only a quarter of a year.

Pros:

No state income tax. This is pretty big chunk of change.
Much cheaper houses compared to California... like you can actually afford one. Though I suppose this is true of most of the U.S.
Gorgeous summers, even by California standards.
Very pretty green trees and foliage everywhere compared to California.
People seem nicer.
If you're a Republican, your vote actually counts for something.

Cons:

Weather - it rains nonstop fall, winter, spring... very depressing.
Horrible commutes. People mostly complain about having to cross the bridge from Seattle into Redmond during rush hour. May not be an issue for you.
Freeway speed limit is 60 instead of 65. Hard to get used to.
No In-N-Out.
Amazon sales tax.
I don't know many people there compared to California.

Anyone with more Washington experience want to comment?

[Edit: Got rid of the green text that looks like a link.]

Entourage history

2004-04-06T09:04:00Z

Omar Shahine and Dan Crevier wrote some very interesting articles about the history of Entourage becoming a Mac Office application.

Surprises

2004-04-06T08:59:00Z

Microsoft released the Windows Installer XML (WiX) toolset yesterday under an open source license, though this is nothing crazy new since the company has released Rotor and even Windows source under its Shared Source program.

Still, this is the first code Microsoft has released under an OSS-approved license. It feels really weird to see something by Microsoft up on SourceForge.

But then again, after seeing Steve Balmer and Scott McNealy cracking jokes up on stage together last week, nothing surprises me anymore.

Positioning objects in Word

2004-04-05T11:49:00Z

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:

Double-click the object to bring up up a dialog.
Click the Layout tab.
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:

Switch to Print Layout view (View menu | Print Layout).
Click the ¶ button on the Standard toolbar to show the document formatting.
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.

Here's a quick example:

[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.