Microsoft Office Reference Guide

Mar 26, 2004

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Every year I attend the largest AV show in the world, InfoComm for a few different reasons. Chief among them is that I get to hobnob with members of the Presentations Council who comprise some of the savviest PowerPoint users and strategists that I have found.

It's a bit of a strange show for a software writer, since 95% of the show is really about hardware. But let's say you need to present in a variety of different venues; understanding the logistics of setting up screens, sound, lights and other important pieces of equipment can really come in handy — particularly if you are a perfectionist and control freak.

This year I spoke at the SuperMonday event as part of a panel on "Telling the Story" — dealing with the impact of new technology on the presentations world.

To get ready for this event I had to make a decision that is being faced by many of you.

My laptop (with which I intended to present) was loaded with Windows XP and Office 2003. But my topic was partly about new technology, and I would be showing features in PowerPoint and Excel 2007.

I did some nice demos on my Office 2007 desktop machine (running Vista) and managed to save my PowerPoint 2007 files in 2003 format, and moved them to the laptop.

I was quite pleased with the way they adapted; particularly the slides with Glow and Reflection effects retained their polish on the older system.

But I didn't really want to limit myself to just showing slides; I wanted to do demos.

My colleague Rick Altman ("Why Most PowerPoint Presentations Suck") was going to be on the same panel and I know he is very slick with demos – he uses hyperlinks in PowerPoint to launch demo programs including PowerPoint itself — and I didn't want to be left behind.

So I invested a few bucks and upgraded my RAM to a GIG on the laptop, added a Program Files folder on my D drive (since my main drive was maxed out and slow) and loaded some of Office 2007 on the laptop.

I opted to keep my old 2003 programs, and added Word, Excel and PowerPoint 2007. I kept Outlook 2003 because Outlook 2007 had caused me some problems during a previous upgrade.

So far that has been the only real glitch; because I loaded Word 2007 Outlook 2003 can't work with it as my Email editor the way it did before. I will need to go into the Outlook options and see if it can locate and work with Word 2003. Sigh.

More important, the Office 2007 programs, especially PowerPoint, seem to be comfortable on the Windows XP machine and in harmony with their 2003 cousins.

If you find yourself in a similar situation, and particularly if you need to exchange files with folks who have not upgraded to Office 2007, you need to be keenly aware of the two different file formats for each program.

For example, the *.DOCX format for Word cannot be opened by Word 2003. You need to get into the habit, when working with Office 2007, to use Compatibility Mode by keeping documents you open from the 2003 format in that format and not upconverting them.

If you want to see a preview of my talk, I will share a secret with you. One of the new PowerPoint templates in 2007 actually shows you all of the best new graphics features in sample slides that you can reuse yourself and look like a pro.

Just click the Office button, start a New file from Template, and choose Introducing PowerPoint 2007.

Figure 1:

Here is a sample slide from the presentation showing off some of the new shape effects. It makes a very good case for upgrading.

Figure 2:

Of course you can easily reuse even these shapes for yourself just by revising the text that they contain.

Figure 3:

This introductory presentation is a great source for new graphics for yourself, right from the title slide, which I appropriated for my InfoComm talk. Notice the gorgeous reflection of the title on the black background.

Figure 4:

How do these effects translate when you save the file in 2003 format, so that it can be shown on a machine without PowerPoint 2007?

Well you get kind of a scary dialog box if you save the file in Compatibility Mode.

Figure 5:

The gist of this is that the gorgeous objects that you created in 2007 cannot be edited in 2003. That's the bad news but should not surprise anyone.

But the good news is that the Compatibility Mode version will present very well on a machine with PowerPoint 2003 (or the PowerPoint viewer that came with that version).

Is there a new viewer that works with PowerPoint 2007 being distributed with the Pack to CD option in PowerPoint 2007?

The answer, amazingly, is yes, and you can download it here.

What that means to you is that you can create a presentation in PowerPoint 2007 with all the bells and whistles, save it in 2007 or 2003 format, and even play the newer file format on older machines using this viewer.

And from a graphics perspective there is a lot to like in PowerPoint 2007. Look at this SmartArt shape with effects — isn't it a quantum leap beyond bullet points?

Figure 6:

Of course there are other resources to be covered as well — like PowerFrameworks, a third party tool that helps storytellers use PowerPoint effectively.

Here is my latest PowerFrameworks gem — all I did was change the animation to make each gear rotate in turn...

Figure 7:

It's what I really like about PowerPoint, even the older versions — there are always exciting visual ways to tell your story.

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