iamcal.com Since May 2000

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• Hello!

Poll:

• Yes
• No

Do you use powerpoint, for whatever reason, work or pleasure. Does anyone use it?

Yesssssssssssssss, my bosses just made me help them with a powerpoint last week -- it is all they know how to use. So obnoxious.

First 'No' vote falls to the Grim...meister =]

Sure do. It is very big here in my company.

I hate it. Mostly because it fails to attempt to compress the file at all so the sizes are stupidly big most of the time. Then you have thick users that put massive bitmaps in it and it gets bigger still. HATE HATE HATE. But then I dont do presentations.

i don't do presentations

I do presentations, but when they are big like that I zip them and let people know that they are big.

You can also pdf them to make them more manageable

there is no need for them to come out that size in the first place! Its just crap!

Its like Publisher in that respect. abismal compression. your right, they don't even try.

Even 3D Studio Max doesnt compress the stuff nicely. you can have a massive Max file and compress it to about 5% of original size using winzip. Now why cant it do that itself?

but word on the other hand, does some amazing compression on bitmaps

In fact, Word does pretty amazing compression on whatever you put in it.

hmm, yeah powerpoint is a bit bloaty, client regularly email me 35 meg files (bastards).
I am trying to work out if it is a helpful tool or not.
IBM banned its use about two years ago and they saw a gain in profitability, the theory is that powerpoint allows the audience to tune out in the presetation because they can 'read it again later', it also stops the presenter from talking with the audience, they tend to talk at them.

It also allows you to create some bastard ugly presentations.

Yeah, but it does cool type-writer noises =]

The only reason I can think of powerpoint not compressing the images is that they dont want to lose any quality. But from what I've seen at the countless crap presentations Ive been to, the projectors only display at the resolution what the laptop is connected to so it makes no difference if the picture is reformatted and saved as the correct size - lowering the filesize one way. Even if there are projectors which display at amazing resolutions, the pictures could be changed to a jpeg or similar type compression without loss of quality. The bottom line is that user shouild be able to choose and they should be educated on the what the outcome is of the choices they make.

Monkey Armada: I agree, any bastard can use powerpoint but very few of those can create a nice looking presentation.

I hate powerpoint.. Every thing I do at uni has to end in a powerpoint presentation.. they insist on it... I'm always in charge of making it look pretty.. its not too hard to make presentations look nice, just choose and interesting font and make the layout sensible, not too much per page... this design lark is fun..

compression doesn't have to be lossy. think of zip files or word - both compress, but neither change the data that comes out the other end.

tif!

cal: But can you imagine a 100MB powerpoint file having to unzip itself completely at the start of a presentation. Hardly shouts performance does it.

only the same as a 100MB word file opening. besides, they unpack on the fly (i believe)

and anyway, there are compression schemes that compress slow but uncompress very fast (audio/video compression!)

I also was under the impression that word unpacked on the fly. But with huge documents (pictures etc) it takes a while for then next page to load. What may seem like a brief stoppage for a user of a word document would be a pain in the arse for somebody in the middle of a presentation.

What audio/video compressions were you talking about that will do this without losing any quality?

i wasn't talking about a particular compression scheme, but many work along the lines of slow compress, fast decompress (so they can be decompressed on the fly)

as for powerpoint, it could usrely do read-ahead decompressing, loading later slides as you viewed the first ones?

but, of course, having an "export" option where is resizes images sensibly would be cool too :)

but, of course, having an "export" option where is resizes images sensibly would be cool too :)

And imho a little more practical considering the ammount of memory it will be eating up. Reading ahead is fine but if you need to go back it wont work quick enough. Unless it puts at least three pages in memory that is.

Maybe I'll email Microsoft and see if they can give me an explanation. I hope they get back to me... not like coca cola >:(

Apparently MS have to give out the source for Word, Excel, Powerpoint, etc to other companies due to the fair trade case or whatever the fuck it is.

May see an improved version for a cheaper price.

Matt: Word compression my arse. Try sticking an HTML document into word, and see if it comes out smaller than it started. :P

that's not really what we're talking about ell

if you mean when you do an "export as html", we know that's awful

if you're just talking about converting html files to doc files, then they're bigger because they store lots more information

what are you talking about, i make all my webpages in word, its great, and so easy too.

oh hang on, sarcasm doesnt translate too well in writing... arse

"oh hang on, sarcasm doesnt translate too well in writing"

as I have found out to my cost many times posting here! people tend to assume you are being serious ;)

So what time shall I pick you up for the clown burning jeff? ;P

Nooooooooooo! Clowns! *cowers*

Cal: In school, I bet you were always the kid who tried to explain why a computer joke wasn't funny while everyone else was laughing at it. :P

cal thinks about php when he's having sex...

cal:ooooh, preg_replace, yeeeeah
cal:i can't get enough of that ob_end_clean()
jeff:oh stop it, you. are. turning. me. on.
cal:strtolower(addslashes(nl2br($jeff)))

jeff: with you?!!?

that was a private conversation jess ;)

ROFLMAO! it shames me to say that I *have* in a moment of delerium walked to the toilet and muttered "brb" just after finishing sex >_< The geek inside (not far inside, mind) is clawing to get out.

Needless to say, she recognised what I meant, and was paralised with laughter. Bloody Internet. :*(

</dignity>

*Whoops, posted this in the wrong thread*

i'm sorry cal. but you know, i think its time we told everyone our dirty secret..

ell: that's fantastic!

Yeah, I use it for presentations at school. My teachers think it's the most amazing thing in the world!

Your teacher is an idiot!

Those who can do, those who can't, teach.

Ohh, we are anti-education today, no?

hehehe

Chandler: best quote ever!

and the gov tried to nick it and change it to "Those Who Can, Teach" which we all know to be a lie

Ell: I hardly think "hehehe" consituted the best quote ever. :p maybe second or third

sul: :P

shit

chandler, you should have said :Þ

hey thats cool. :Þ