Powerpoint, Flash, and why you shouldn't...

I understand the point of PowerPoint - I really do. Even when criticised for a "pipeline" approach to presenting information. Even when the three-way simultaneous bombardment of visual, textual and aural information is causing mental shutdown in the audience. Even when presentations become so bloated that they become a hindrance to global security... even when drowning in the deepest depths of clip-art hell, I understand its appeal and why it remains so entrenched in corporate life.

What I don't understand, however, is why Microsoft seems content for it to remain such a clunky, buggy, temperamental albatross of an application. Over the past couple of revisions we've seen the introduction of pseudo-3D text styles, nice fades rather than the old-school pixel dissolve, and a larger range of fly-ins than Easyjet. All very lovely (if still lagging somewhat behind Apple's Keynote), but still not even coming close to addressing the real problems.

Take one of our recent experiences as an example. Our client wanted their PowerPoint presentation to offer a little more in the way of visual punch. Aware of the common traps when designing engaging slides, they wondered if we could add some fancy eye-candy using Flash. Surely no problem, right? The software has been around for over a decade now in various forms, and is as widespread as any other document format. Heck, there's even an option to insert a "Flash Document" under the "Insert Object" menu. Except... um... that doesn't work, either crashing the application, displaying an error or settling simply for displaying a Flash icon.

No, instead we need the "Developer" menu (helpfully hidden by default), so we can insert a "Shockwave Flash Object" control. Cue a baffling series of parameters, embedding options, not to mention delving into the code view's Visual Basic editor to hack a script that makes sure the Flash movie rewinds correctly when returning to a slide. Which in turn means your PowerPoint is now loaded with enough macros to terrify even the most liberal of corporate IT lockdowns. When it works, of course... which it might not :-/

Oh, and don't expect any of this to work on any Macs running the slides. Nope, this is ActiveX territory only.

Surely this isn't the future of corporate presentations - locked into slide after slide of the same stale templates simply because PowerPoint is so backwards it can't cope with the inclusion of anything more complex than a sound file?

Distorted images in Internet Explorer

One of our clients recently complained that the images on their website were looking distorted and fuzzy when viewed in Internet Explorer 6 on Windows XP. We tried to replicate the problem on our own IE6/XP setup but we could find any problem. We asked our client to try other computers and browsers in his office and they worked just fine too.

After a long and drawn out process of elimination, googling and head scratching, Ian finally came across an article that talked about distorted images in Internet Explorer caused by the operating system using non-standard DPI settings.

Basically, there's a setting in the advanced settings of the display control panel that allows you to change the DPI from 96 (normal) to 120 (oversize). This setting is sometimes used to increase system font size but has the side effect of badly scaling all images in Internet Explorer by 125% - hence the distortion and fuzziness.

Needless to say, after changing the DPI setting back to 96, our client's problem was resolved.

If this post helped you with the same problem, please let us know by adding a comment.

Does Google prefer hypens or underscores?

Senior Google guy Matt Cutts has recently confirmed that it is still preferable to use a hyphen instead of an underscore when naming files or web pages. Google will read a URL such as www.wordsun.co.uk/corporate_web_site_design.html and conclude that the page is about "corporate_web_site_design" not "corporate web site design". Do you see the difference? In the former example, corporate_web_site_design is treated as a single word (one that no one would ever for search for) whereas the latter example will give Google four separate key words to chew on plus a whole phrase "corporate", "web", "site", "design" and "corporate website design".

In the long term Google may be looking into interpreting the underscore character as a word separator but for now the advice is still definitely - don't use underscores!