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ibook_steve · Jun 2, 2011, 09:21 PM

I know I'm a little late to the party, but I finally got around to downloading the Office 2011 demo. I unfortunately live my life in Powerpoint being in a Windows house at work, so I checked out the new features.

Have you seen the Reorder Objects view that lets you see layers in your slide in 3D and rearrange them?

Video: Manage objects and layers easily

Dare I say it, but that's pretty cool. I'm not a 'shopper, so I don't know how Photoshop manages layers these days, but that view is actually a really good idea when you have tons of objects on a slide which overlap each other.

Am I overly impressed or am I just sick of using Powerpoint so much that even little stupid things like this excite me?

Steve

Cold Warrior · Jun 2, 2011, 09:41 PM

Impressive. I hadn't seen that. Thanks.

turtle777 · Jun 2, 2011, 09:46 PM

Wow

That's something you'd expect from Keynote, but not from M$. Kudos.

-t

Salty · Jun 2, 2011, 11:08 PM

That actually does look cool. Too bad the idea is probably patented it would be highly useful in Adobe and Apple's apps.

Big Mac · Jun 2, 2011, 11:55 PM

I'm having trouble visualizing what's being described, but I had to pull another all-nighter and may be too weak to comprehend such a thing right now. . .

ibook_steve · Jun 3, 2011, 12:49 AM

You view the object layers of your slide in a 3D side view, kind of like if you took the Time Machine interface and looked at it from the side at a 3/4 perspective. Each layer in your slide is numbered and has the objects on it associated with that layer. To move objects up or down the stack of layers, you simple drag a layer to where you want it to go, no more "Bring Forward" or "Send back", things I end up doing all the time and absolutely hate, especially if there is an animation on one of those hidden objects.

Steve

TETENAL · Jun 3, 2011, 08:44 PM

Cool.

moonmonkey · Jun 4, 2011, 10:13 PM

Very smart, I like.

-Q- · Jun 5, 2011, 01:55 PM

I didn't know about that. Very, very cool.

steve626 · Jun 13, 2011, 10:02 PM

Another useful feature in Powerpoint 2011 is that in several places (including the File menu), you can tell it to reduce the file size by undersampling graphics that have been embedded. You can specify for just certain slides, or for the entire file, and you can tell it how much resolution you want to keep. One file we had went from 500 MB in size to just 2.1 MB. The images looked almost indistinguishable on the computer screen side by side (before and after). Of course, I've never understood why the ppt or pptx files were so large to start with.

ibook_steve · Jun 14, 2011, 02:40 AM

A 500 MB Powerpoint file?!! What the heck did you have in it to make it that big? I work on slide decks of over 400 slides sometimes and the file is never bigger than 30 MB at max.

Steve

P · Jun 14, 2011, 04:50 AM

That's a well-known bug in OLE. If you, on Windows and in certain versions of Office, paste a JPEG picture, it is included as an OLE object. Because there may or may not be a JPEG decoder present on all future systems the file may be viewed on, OLE will also include a "preview" object...which is actually a 24-bit BMP in full resolution. Oh yes. The workaround is to include the picture by selecting Insert picture from file instead. You can manually shrink the size of such a document by exporting all the photos to files and importing them back in - all that Office 2011 does is automate that process.

ibook_steve · Jun 14, 2011, 01:21 PM

Interesting. I always use Insert File instead of copy and paste because I put in a bunch of screenshots in TIFF format.

Steve

steve626 · Jun 15, 2011, 12:24 AM

Originally Posted by ibook_steve

A 500 MB Powerpoint file?!! What the heck did you have in it to make it that big? I work on slide decks of over 400 slides sometimes and the file is never bigger than 30 MB at max.

Steve

My daughter had a 60-slide slideshow, each slide showing high resolution photos and scanned in sketches. Each photo (from a digital SLR) was about 10 MB in jpg file format, the scanned in sketches were similar, and each was put into the powerpoint file with the insert picture from file option. After a number of these, her file was > 500 MB in size. Shrunk to less than 3 MB with the reduce file option in Powerpoint 2011.

Spheric Harlot · Jun 15, 2011, 02:05 AM

So is this the "PowerPoint is cool" thread, or the typical "Egad, Microsoft stuff sucks donkey balls, but they've built in band aids to let users fix teh Suck" thread?

P · Jun 15, 2011, 03:24 AM

Originally Posted by steve626

My daughter had a 60-slide slideshow, each slide showing high resolution photos and scanned in sketches. Each photo (from a digital SLR) was about 10 MB in jpg file format, the scanned in sketches were similar, and each was put into the powerpoint file with the insert picture from file option. After a number of these, her file was > 500 MB in size. Shrunk to less than 3 MB with the reduce file option in Powerpoint 2011.

That just means that it crashes down the resolution to the maximum that is useful (depending on your settings, for onscreen viewing on printing on a laser) and then recompresses it. That particular feature has been there for 10 years at least, except they hid it. Previously, you had to do Properties on a picture and click around a bit to find the interface - which then let you recompress ALL pictures, not just the one you clicked on.

Originally Posted by Spheric Harlot

So is this the "PowerPoint is cool" thread, or the typical "Egad, Microsoft stuff sucks donkey balls, but they've built in band aids to let users fix teh Suck" thread?

Powerpoint is so far from cool as it is possible to be. The interface is fundamentally broken in a way I haven't seen anywhere else, and if they're fixing a few of the most egregious flaws, it's still not enough to make it good. Don't mind Office otherwise, but there is a reason that Powerpoint sold about three copies before they started bundling it with Word and Excel.