So here’s an interesting little pair of bugs related to Microsoft’s PowerPoint - both the Mac and Windows versions. At work I had to make a presentation with a crapload of graphs showing the results from a customer survey they ran. I originally wanted to play around with Keynote and export it to PowerPoint, but I ran into a bunch of problems there (which I just happened to resolve today with thanks to the Keynote Yahoo! Group mailing list and not to Apple’s own support forums).
Anyway, I created about 25 charts in Excel and dragged ‘n dropped them on to the appropriate slides in PowerPoint. They looked fine on my PowerBook when I presented to the VP (although the 30-slide presentation was a worrying 14MB). He asked that I send it to him so he could brief the President as well as the Sales team. No problemo - or so I thought.
Shortly after emailing the gargantuan presentation, I got an email back complaining about some weird problems he was having with it. I popped in his office and noticed that every 3D chart had a bad case of the “jaggies”. Looked like crap on his Windows laptop. I went back to my desk and on a hunch I tried saving a couple of the charts as pictures within Excel, then inserted them into PowerPoint. I then sent the new presentation over to a co-worker to see what it looked like in Windows - what a difference! PNG’s rendered the lines of the graphs just fine, but the text looked a little shoddy. I tried again with BMP’s and struck gold!
The second tidbit? After replacing every single graph in the presentation with BMP’s, the file size shrunk to 1.4MB! Keep in mind, each image that was sourced was over 2MB in size. Good job, Microsoft.
« OK, I’m done
Thanks for the update. I continue to hold out hope — although, as I posted on my own blog recently — I hope this doesn’t take on a “least common denominator” approach and lower Steve’s genius and Peter’s artistic insight to Phil’s level of schmalz …
– david
Comment by David Amulet — 12/29/2005 @ 1:20 pm
Thanks for dropping by David! I’d have to say from reading your exceptionally clever post, we’re pretty much on the same page (although I think I might allow a little more for Phil’s earlier solo stuff).
There’s always a concern for mass commercial-selloutitude when these sorts of things happen (Didn’t Eagles fans need to take out another mortgage for the “Hell Froze Over” tour?), I’m pretty optimistic that any fruits of a reunion wouldn’t stoop to Phil’s descent into formulaic (yet large-income-generating) pop. After all, there are ego’s aplenty among this group - including Steve and Peter, and those two have been particularly good at keeping to an artistic standard. My inability to really be able (or desire) to listen to the vast majority of Phil’s solo stuff does not take away my appreciation of his talents as a drummer. I think that if we see (rather, hear) anything from this potential reunion, it’ll be all good.
While their remake of “Carpet Crawlers” a while back shows that they have the ability to work together again, my biggest doubt is whether they be able to do it for an entire album (never mind the potential roadblocks they might have in doing such a thing). Of course, if they tour - I’ll be beside myself (I get a little impatient with Peter’s tour-once-a-decade philosophy).
Comment by Brian — 12/29/2005 @ 2:35 pm
Agreed — if they tour, I’ll be all over it! Thanks for stopping by and checking out the article; I hope that you continue to enjoy my “clever” posts (I appreciate the compliment).
– david
Comment by David Amulet — 1/1/2006 @ 6:53 pm