Does this Presentation Make Me Look Flat?

All About PowerPoint’s New Picture Presentation feature.

It is not unusual to hear the criticism that Microsoft employees just design features for themselves. It’s not true; we spend an incredible amount of time seeking out feedback and concerns, then analyzing it, and finally figuring out the best mix of features to satisfy specific customer scenarios. The design decisions around features we do, the performance we target, and workflows we define all require a ton of customer-based investigation and justification.

Every now and then we get specific feedback from customers within Microsoft that we think will resonate broadly outside as well. In PowerPoint 2010 the Save as Picture Presentation was just such a feature.

The feature takes any presentation and “flattens” the content to a single picture per slide. Why? Because once your content is a picture, it is harder to modify. While researching work for Office 2010, we reviewed the workflows of a group within Microsoft that creates our executive’s presentations.  We discovered they were doing this process “by hand.” It was a very time consuming process we thought would be easy to turn into a feature. Steven Winard, Microsoft’s Executive Presentations Manager, summed the situation up for us:

To better understand this situation, let’s look at the average slide. It’s a collection of objects that “sit” on top of the slide background: text, shapes, charts, and other objects. Because they maintain their unique type, each object can be edited throughout the life of the presentation. That’s a key strength of the presentation document.

Slides are composed of multiple objects, each of which maintains its editablitity.

But for those customers who distribute their presentations, it’s also a potential weakness. We’ve had numerous requests over the years to make distribution of a presentation more secure. To prevent recipients from “borrowing” or modifying parts of the slide content, or even misrepresenting the original author’s intent.

Over many versions we’ve provided many levels of this type of security with features like Password Protection and Information Rights Management. For many, these are successful ways of maintaining control. But many customers have told us that those features go beyond their needs, and are too complex for the people receiving the documents. The fact that author needs to separately communicate passwords or the recipient needs to subscribe to identification services to make them work makes it too clumsy or complex. They want a solution with no dialogs, no distribution restrictions. They want the document to be printable and presentable. These are all reasonable requests.

In reviewing the Executive Presentations scenario we decided that we could provide the same base document they were crafting by hand through the Save As dialog. There would be obvious limits to the feature. Animation would become static and media would not play. However, the creation process would be reduced to seconds, and we could add more functionality to the picture based document that was not available otherwise. The new feature could create a document that preserved transitions and document properties. Many presentations would be much smaller, easier to mail or download. We also take special measures to make sure you can’t save the Picture Presentation back over your original document, which would typically be a very bad thing as you’d lose the possibility of editing the content in the future.

The success of a feature is gauged by the user feedback. Again, Steven Winard:

The sample presentation below was created by Save as Picture Presentation using a development build of PowerPoint 2010. It was posted to the Microsoft News Center on October 22nd, 2009, shortly after the Windows 7 launch event. The original presentation was 22mb while the picture presentation is about 1.4mb, making it a much faster download.

So, does it look flat?

So, our internal group was satisfied. Still, it’s important to hear from you as well... how well did we do? You can judge for yourself. Download the full presentation here.  You view it with any version of PowerPoint, the PowerPoint Web App on SkyDrive,or the PowerPoint Viewer.

Sure, it’s not a format we expect everyone to use every day. It’s not supposed replace the standard way you save your work. Like many features in PowerPoint, Save as Picture Presentation is a handy tool to have ready when you need it.

Ric Bretschneider
Senior Program Manager
Microsoft PowerPoint