Software That’s Good Enough That You Forget You’re Using It: No.3 Microsoft PowerPoint 2003

The best technology is transparent: so good you don’t think of it as technology at all. When technology reaches maturity it disappears into the fabric of our lives. In 2006, Microsoft Office PowerPoint for Windows had been around in various guises for many years and had reached that level of maturity. PowerPoint is used ubiquitously to mean presentation software. Doing a PowerPoint means preparing a presentation with computer software. And then Microsoft gave us Office PowerPoint for Windows 2007, a product that shares an interface with its peers in the latest version of Microsoft Office that seems as transparent to me as a brick wall and only serves to demonstrate that transparency can be removed as well as added.

Microsoft Office PowerPoint for Windows 2003 was the summation of a long process of refinement of previous versions. Some of the reasons for its transparency were simply products of its longevity and domination of the market. People knew what it looked like, and knew that if you sent a .ppt presentation to a colleague they would be able to view it. The menu structure although somewhat complicated was standardized across the Office range.

It is higher than Word in my list because it was a more enjoyable package to use and probably easier as well.

Transparency is often about the absence of barriers to the user. In the interests of progress, PowerPoint for Windows 2007 put a number of barriers in the way of users. First was the new file format. Defended as needed to make the file format an open standard, it ignores that fact there already was an open presentation file format (.opf) and that .ppt had become a de facto standard. The impact was that it was no longer true that you could send a PowerPoint presentation and expect the recipient to be able to read it. Worse, PowerPoint 2007 refused to read my older PowerPoint presentations which it regards as a security risk.

The second barrier for the user is the new improved ribbon interface. I still cannot find all the functions I want to, even after over a year’s use. Defenders say that once I have got used to it, it will seem more logical than its predecessor. How long? One year, two years? It hasn’t happened yet.

This leaves me with a problem for the second time in my top ten. PowerPoint 2003 is obsolete. So what are the transparent current PowerPoint alternatives? In the spirit of imitation being the sincerest form of flattery, Kingsoft Office provides a modern re-interpretation of PowerPoint 2003, and Open Office 3 provides a slightly different interpretation. Best of all, if you still have Office PowerPoint for Windows 2003, my advice is to hang onto it. It works just fine with Vista.

Finally, there is now an intriguing modern alternative. PowerPoint is a package designed in the 1980s and updated ever since. These days, presentations make much wider use of rich media and are often distributed on-line. For such applications, 280 slides, downloadable from http://280slides.com/ is a really interesting application. It is no direct replacement for PowerPoint but is wonderfully easy to use, freely available on-line, and integrates with Flash and other modern media content much more easily than PowerPoint.

Microsoft Office PowerPoint for Windows 2003 is a PowerPoint processor that’s transparent enough that the new version cannot compete on transparency. Fortunately, this has created the opportunity for other providers who can provide you with a transparent presentation package, or with an intriguing alternative like 280slides.com.