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10-15-04 Dr. Neale Monks
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- Product Name: PowerPoint
2004
- Company: Microsoft
- URL: http://www.microsoft.com/mac/
- Category: Presentation
software
- Price:
- $499 Office 2004 Professional edition
(includes Virtual PC 7)
- $299 Office 2004
Standard edition
- $239 Office 2004 Upgrade
- $149 Office
2004 Student and teacher edition
- $229
PowerPoint 2004 Retail package
- $109
PowerPoint 2004 Upgrade
- Requirements:
- G3 PowerMac
- OS X 10.2.8
- at least
450 MB hard disk space
- Rating: 3 bounces (2
bounces as an upgrade from PowerPoint v.
X)
-
Lustworthy
Microsoft Office remains one of the most
popular Mac programs around, in part because
it is so versatile, but also because it allows
virtually flawless collaboration with PC users.
Over the years the Mac version of the suite
has more or less monopolised the Macintosh
business software market, with only relatively
few alternatives remaining commercially successful.
Some of these, like AppleWorks,
have carved a niche out at the low end of
the market by combining a substantial set
of features with a very modest price tag.
Others, like Nisus
Writer,
sport high-end features such as support for
multiple languages, which is missing from
Microsoft Office but essential to certain
groups of users. Still, for many people the
three main applications in Office, Word, Excel,
and PowerPoint, are the tools of choice for
the core office tasks of writing documents,
analysing budgets, and making presentations.
Fortunately for Mac OS X users, Microsoft
released an OS X native version of Office
very quickly, and without this Apple would
have undoubtedly found the uptake of the new
operating system much more difficult to push.
However, relations between Cupertino and Redmond
are not entirely harmonious, and Apple has
fired one or two shots across the bow of the
Microsoft ship of state. The Apple web browser,
Safari, has rapidly become the OS X browser
of choice for many people thanks to its speed
and security features, rendering Explorer
pretty much a dead program as far as Mac users
are concerned. More seriously, Keynote has
given Mac users a very compelling alternative
to PowerPoint, drawing on many of the advanced
technologies Mac OS X users enjoy that PC
users don't have, such as automatic ligatures,
anti-aliasing, and real-time PostScript text
and graphics processing. The result was a
program that produced slides that made those
from PowerPoint look positively Neanderthal
in comparison. For those Mac users who didn't
need PowerPoint compatibility, Keynote offered
a less expensive alternative that actually
did more, and unsurprisingly many people (including
the author) switched from PowerPoint to Keynote.
But that was then, this is now, and Microsoft
have spruced up the entire Office suite and
rolled in lots of new functions and features.
But does the new version of PowerPoint in
Office 2004 do anything to reduce the gap
between the two programs, or indeed have enough
to attract Keynote users back into the Microsoft
fold?
Installation and Performance
Whatever else, Microsoft has installers down
to a fine art. As with earlier versions of
Office, the user has the choice of a simple
drag and drop installation or a tailor-made
installation using a special installer application.
This latter route makes more sense for most
users as the installer program includes special
options for removing features like foreign
languages and clip art that take up space
but may be rarely used. It also can be used
to delete prior installations, freeing up
disk space and preventing conflicts between
older and newer versions of Office. While
the installer runs, a "coming attractions" slide
show highlights some of the new features of
Office 2004, an entertaining and useful touch.
 |
The installation application is simple
and intuitive, doing a nice job of removing
existing installations of Office and allowing
the user to customize aspects of the installation
such as languages. |
Once installed, PowerPoint 2004 launches
and feels just as fast the PowerPoint v. X
and noticeably faster than Keynote. The basic
layout of the program is the same as in the
preceding version of PowerPoint. Probably
the most obvious difference is the formatting
palette, which has been spruced up noticeably,
and includes new buttons for changing the
overall theme and setting the slide transition
animations.
Slide Templates and Transitions
By default, the Project Gallery is the first
thing that appears when PowerPoint is launched,
and it offers up a variety of slide templates
to work from. The Project Gallery isn't very
different to earlier versions, the main difference
being the addition of tabbed panels that switch
the user from the templates to other sections,
such as the ones for ongoing projects, tutorials,
and preferences. The Project Gallery is nicely
designed being much less busy and a bit more
Mac-like than it was in PowerPoint v. X. The
Learn panel, for example, provides links to
PDF and HTML files describing Microsoft Office
features and functions. There are also PowerPoint
files that can be opened and explored, for
example one shows off the kiosk mode, with
the notes attached to the file explaining
how to create the necessary hyperlinks.
 |
The Project Gallery (top) is neater
and easier to use that in earlier versions
(bottom), and the range of templates has
been beefed up considerably. |
 |
But how do the new templates look? One of
the places PowerPoint v. X looked weak when
compared with Keynote was in the quality of
the templates. They tended to rely on garish
colour schemes employing stripes, simplistic
clip art, and vividly coloured typography.
Well, to be honest, they aren't that much
better, but there are at least more of them.
Having said this, I never found the majority
of the Keynote ones that great either, but
there is no question that the average Keynote
template has a much richer, more sophisticated
feel to it that the average PowerPoint one.
Good advice for newcomers to PowerPoint is
to forget about the templates and rely on
finding a subtle, easy to read colour scheme
with simple fonts on a plain background, and
creating these is easy enough using the Formatting
Palette.
 |
The PowerPoint templates are still garish
and shockingly brightly coloured, but
at least there are a lot of them. |
 |
The Formatting Pallete also allows on the
fly changes to things like slide transitions
more quickly than in the earlier version of
PowerPoint, where many of these features relied
on buttons and menu items. One of the nifty
things Keynote introduced into presentations
was the use of three dimensional slide transitions,
in particular the rotating cube transition
where the slides appear as successive faces
on a cube. PowerPoint 2004 now has similar
transitions, including the cube and cards
that flip over to reveal the next slide. As
with earlier versions of PowerPoint, there
are sound effects that can be applied to these
transitions, though skilled presenters don't
use them.
 |
The floating Formatting Palette gives
the user quick access to many design features
including slide layout, typography, colour
schemes, and transitions. |
Graphical Wizardry
One of the areas where PowerPoint had been
weak in comparison to Keynote was in its range
of graphical effects. Keynote was designed
from the ground up to use the Quartz component
of OS X that allows hardware-accelerated effects
such as anti-aliasing, transparency, and shadows.
In contrast, PowerPoint v. X retained the
same basic graphical tools as all the earlier
versions of the program. Anti-aliasing was
impossible, and shadows and transparency were
much more crudely done. Moreover, PowerPoint
handled embedded artwork as bitmaps, where
Keynote treated them as vector-based items,
which meant that resizing or rotating artwork
in PowerPoint resulted in jagged edges, blurring,
and other undesirable artefacts.
 |
In PowerPoint v. X, shadows and colour
fills are applied separately, and the
overall effect is relatively crude, for
example the solid-looking shadow. |
PowerPoint 2004 handles graphics in a much
more modern way, and the differences between
it and Keynote are now much smaller. The Formatting
Palette now lets you add colours and shadows
at the same time, making it far easier to
adjust these effects to get precisely what
you want. Draggable sliders for transparency
and softness make these tools easier to use
as well, and instead of a few preset positions
for the shadow, shadows can be can be cast
in any direction. The overall effect is much
more sophisticated than before, and definitely
at the level modern Mac users have come to
expect.
 |
PowerPoint 2004 now provides a similar
degree of control over colour, translucency,
and shadows as Keynote. Note the more
natural blending of the two colours of
the triangle, and the diffuse shadow behind
it. |
But dipping into the OS X toolkit introduces
some new problems when PowerPoint 2004 files
are shared with Windows computers running
PowerPoint 2003. Because Windows doesn't handle
graphics in quite the same way, and lacks
the system-wide graphics sophistication of
OS X, things like drop shadows and transparency
don't transfer well between the two platforms.
To prevent this happening, a new Compatibility
Report checks over PowerPoint files, and depending
on what platforms and versions of PowerPoint
you select, alerts you to any potential problems.
 |
PowerPoint
2004 alerts the user to graphical features
that might not copy across to Windows
nicely, as here, with this items transparency
and shadows (top). When viewed on a
Windows PC, the graphic is far cruder
in comparison. |
|
Typography
Another key area of difference between PowerPoint
v. X and Keynote was the handling of fonts,
in particular PowerPoint's inability to do
use the automatic ligatures that come with
many Macintosh fonts, and the application
of anti-aliasing to the text. PowerPoint 2004
still doesn't anti-alias the text, and while
it can use ligatures, it doesn't always get
them right. Also, ligatures don't carry across
to Windows computers, and should be avoided
by users working in a mixed platform environment
and needing to share files.
On the other hand, general usage of fonts
is notably easier than in Keynote, thanks
to the Formatting Palette. I cannot warm to
the Font palette in Keynote, it is too cramped
and fiddly to use for my liking. The Formatting
Palette in PowerPoint 2004, by contrast, is
simple and intuitive. One of its strengths
is that the fonts are displayed in their typefaces;
making it very easy to select which one you
want to use.
Interface
In general, PowerPoint is easy to use, and
fairly intuitive, but there are one or two
areas where Keynote has a distinct edge. For
example, while both have rulers and guides,
only Keynote lets you have an unlimited number
of guides that you can drag out from the rulers
(as with Photoshop and other graphics packages).
PowerPoint allows only two, one vertical and
one horizontal, though these can at least
be moved about which allows some degree of
flexibility when it comes to aligning text
boxes and graphics.
PowerPoint also lacks Keynote's on-the-fly
guides that tell you when items on the slide
are aligned by making the object 'sticky'
and pause as you pull it across the slide.
Indeed, while graphical objects in PowerPoint
are 'sticky' and give some feedback when they
are aligned or touching, it is far inferior
to the same actions in Keynote. Indeed, sometimes
it feels downright buggy. When aligning these
two coloured shapes, the preview seems to
show the blue block will sit right below the
red block (top), but when you release the
mouse the blue block ends up somewhere completely
different (centre). Keynote, in contrast,
aligns the objects exactly as you would expect
them to (bottom).
 |
 |
 |
| When aligning objects, the preview (top)
isn't what you end up with (centre). Keynote
behaves in a much more intuitive way (bottom). |
Presenter Tools
So far this review has been somewhat critical,
and it is easy to get the impression that
the Microsoft is playing a clumsy game of
catch-up with Keynote, matching as many features
as possible while retaining the overall compatibility
of the program with the Windows version. But
there is one part of PowerPoint that really
does blow Keynote out of the water, and that's
in the Presenter Tools.
 |
The new Presenter Tools gives the presenter
a different view of the slide show to
the audience, allowing the presenter to
see his note and keep an eye on the time. |
Essentially what the Presenter Tools do is
to show the slide normally on the screen your
audience is looking at, while showing a modified
view on your computer screen. The presenter
sees not just the slide being shown, but also
thumbnails of the preceding and succeeding
slides, a clock, and a notes pane for adding
reminders of important points. There is also
an on-screen pen for 'drawing' on slides,
which can be useful for illustrating connections
between items on a graphic, for example.
Exporting Files
PowerPoint 2004 also has a strong suite of
output options. As mentioned earlier on, the
Compatibility Report keeps a check on files
to ensure backward compatability with earlier
versions of the program on Macs and PC, but
PowerPoint is also able to save versions of
the slide show as web pages and as QuickTime
movies. These are both very flexible formats,
and while the quality of the movie files seems
to be consistently good, web pages are a bit
trickier. If a slide show looks busy in PowerPoint,
expect the limitations of HTML to exaggerate
this still further.
 |
PowerPoint files can be exported as
QuickTime movies. |
Conclusion
Rating this new version of PowerPoint is
tricky, since there really isn't anything
wrong with it; the problem is that except
for the Presenter Tools, there isn't anything
radically new about it that would make it
a must-have upgrade for users of PowerPoint
v. X. Moreover, it still lags behind Keynote
in terms of graphical and typographical sophistication,
with the variable handling of ligatures and
the seemingly buggy guides being the biggest
let-downs. On the other hand, it certainly
is more refined, easier to use, and comes
with a solid set of features, and minor annoyances
and limitations aside, is easily up to the
task of putting on professional presentations.
It's a bit of a shame that the templates are
still as crude as ever, and really do stand
is sharp contrast to the subtlety of what's
available to Mac users through programs like
iPhoto and iDVD, let alone Keynote. Microsoft
really can do better here, as demonstrated
by the impressive tutorial slide shows, and
so it would be nice to see them throw out
all the old 'hurricane in a paint factory'
templates and come up with some new templates
that are subtle and sophisticated.
On the other hand, the Presenter Tools are
innovative and will probably become quite
popular. The interface has been improved,
as with the Formatting Palette for example.
Since PowerPoint is so strongly established
in both Mac and PC markets, the incorporation
of a compatibility tool is also a welcome
new feature. All in all then, as a straightforward
alternative to Keynote it probably deserves
no less than a three-bounce rating, but as
an upgrade to PowerPoint v. X, only two. Microsoft
has done a good job in keeping the new version
of PowerPoint in the game, but not quite ahead
of it.
In Part 2 of this review of Microsoft Office
2004, Neale Monks will look at Excel and Entourage.
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