J
Joseph M. Newcomer
I have finally given up and tried PPT 2007, and have regretted every minute of the
experience.
Now I have a killer bug in animations. No matter which item I select in the animation,
the dropdown menu applies to some apparently randomly-selected item. Aniimations cannot
be removed, dragged to new positions, and even the up-arrow/down-arrow options at the
bottom simply move a randomly-selected item (note the actual selected item) up or down.
This has resulted in a presentation with seriously unusable animations. I can't even
remove them to produce a non-animated slide!
I wonder: are these products ever *tested* before release? This one clearly was not.
In addition, changing a font is a painful experience; it takes 12-15 seconds to drop down
the font menu, apparently because each time it has to enumerate each of the 1,000 or so
fonts that I have installed (apparently, it is good enough to release if it works for
children and newbies, and considerations for professional users are not even on the table
for discussion). I sometimes have 3-5 font changes per slide (due to terminal brain
damage, the notion of having "styles" such as "program identifiers" applies only to Word
and not PowerPoint). It is completely unusable.
Another bug: if I move down to the Notes section and scroll it down, as soon as I release
it, it snaps back; I have to scroll it down a SECOND time to make the scrolling "stick".
The caret (|) appears at the end of the line
LIKE THIS|
but when I hit <enter>, I get something
LIKE T
HIS|
and if I type something I get
LIKE T
somethingHIS|
that is, the position of the caret and the position where text is inserted seem to have no
correlation. This most often appears when I click into the Notes section, but sometimes
happens when I click into the text area.
When I click into the text of a normal sllide, it thinks the caret was somewhere else and
somehow thinks the shift key was being held down, so it selects some random region of text
up to where I clicked, instead of just giving me a caret at the point where I clicked.
We won't even waste time talking about the loss of functionality, such as no pattern
fills, no patterned lines, gradient fills that are far too limited (we don't get what we
had in PPT 2003), and so on; this is a concept of "improvement" of which I have been
previously unaware. Instead of fixing existing problems or adding needed features, all we
got was an unusable GUI and whole sets of new bugs!
Why don't we have a library of a couple thousand textures? At least a few hundred? Let's
try, the next time, to IMPROVE the product, not just CHANGE it! Lose NO existing
functionality, fix bugs, add useful features, but gratuitous change for the sake of
gratuitous change is pointless!
Does anyone know how to get around this animation bug? The other problems seem inherent
in what is laughingly referred to as "the design".
joe
Joseph M. Newcomer [MVP]
email: (e-mail address removed)
Web: http://www.flounder.com
MVP Tips: http://www.flounder.com/mvp_tips.htm
experience.
Now I have a killer bug in animations. No matter which item I select in the animation,
the dropdown menu applies to some apparently randomly-selected item. Aniimations cannot
be removed, dragged to new positions, and even the up-arrow/down-arrow options at the
bottom simply move a randomly-selected item (note the actual selected item) up or down.
This has resulted in a presentation with seriously unusable animations. I can't even
remove them to produce a non-animated slide!
I wonder: are these products ever *tested* before release? This one clearly was not.
In addition, changing a font is a painful experience; it takes 12-15 seconds to drop down
the font menu, apparently because each time it has to enumerate each of the 1,000 or so
fonts that I have installed (apparently, it is good enough to release if it works for
children and newbies, and considerations for professional users are not even on the table
for discussion). I sometimes have 3-5 font changes per slide (due to terminal brain
damage, the notion of having "styles" such as "program identifiers" applies only to Word
and not PowerPoint). It is completely unusable.
Another bug: if I move down to the Notes section and scroll it down, as soon as I release
it, it snaps back; I have to scroll it down a SECOND time to make the scrolling "stick".
The caret (|) appears at the end of the line
LIKE THIS|
but when I hit <enter>, I get something
LIKE T
HIS|
and if I type something I get
LIKE T
somethingHIS|
that is, the position of the caret and the position where text is inserted seem to have no
correlation. This most often appears when I click into the Notes section, but sometimes
happens when I click into the text area.
When I click into the text of a normal sllide, it thinks the caret was somewhere else and
somehow thinks the shift key was being held down, so it selects some random region of text
up to where I clicked, instead of just giving me a caret at the point where I clicked.
We won't even waste time talking about the loss of functionality, such as no pattern
fills, no patterned lines, gradient fills that are far too limited (we don't get what we
had in PPT 2003), and so on; this is a concept of "improvement" of which I have been
previously unaware. Instead of fixing existing problems or adding needed features, all we
got was an unusable GUI and whole sets of new bugs!
Why don't we have a library of a couple thousand textures? At least a few hundred? Let's
try, the next time, to IMPROVE the product, not just CHANGE it! Lose NO existing
functionality, fix bugs, add useful features, but gratuitous change for the sake of
gratuitous change is pointless!
Does anyone know how to get around this animation bug? The other problems seem inherent
in what is laughingly referred to as "the design".
joe
Joseph M. Newcomer [MVP]
email: (e-mail address removed)
Web: http://www.flounder.com
MVP Tips: http://www.flounder.com/mvp_tips.htm