Fliptron Trial Preparation

Approximately 36 hours ago, Microsoft Office Labs released a plugin called “pptPlex” for PowerPoint 2007. It’s a fun looking plugin. Unfortunately, I’m unable to test it since I’m using Office for Mac… I say “unfortunately” because it really does look like it would be fun to play with! My understanding from reading the website and watching the videos, though, is that looking pretty and being fun are about all pptPlex has going for it.

This, of course, is a bad thing. Because if there is one thing worse than a presentation overflowing with bullet-filled slides… It’s that same presentation, animated. And at its heart, pptPlex is just another fancy animation tool. Here’s how Microsoft describes it:

“This plug-in allows you to arrange slides on a canvas then zoom between the slides during the presentation. You can move around the canvas and show groups of slides, individual slides, or even zoom in to show a particular section of a slide.”

In other words… You can see all the slides at once, or you can see only some of the slides, or you can see individual slides, or you can see sections of individual slides. Being able to zoom in and zoom out, as pretty as it may look, will do nothing to combat the “Death by PowerPoint” wrought by jamming as much information as possible into every single slide. If anything, it encourages putting more information on a slide since if you can’t read it, you can at least zoom it!

As my presentation idol, Garr Reynolds, has said, “[PowerPoint] is not a method, it’s simply a kind of tool. A kind of tool that can be used effectively or ineffectively. It all depends on your approach and your method.” These are as true words as any. I find it disappointing, though, that Microsoft isn’t making being effective any easier.

What do you think? Have you had the opportunity to actually test pptPlex? Please, feel free to comment below and share your thoughts and experiences…

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