Lyin's and Scanners and Tears, Oh My

I recently bought a Canon CanoScan LiDE 700f (who makes up these product names???) to replace an older scanner that has no drivers for anything later than Windows XP.

It’s a nice little scanner, comes with decent, if peculiar, software.  Of course, the software for every scanner I’ve owned has earned the Badge of Peculiarity with ease.  Do hardware companies hire Martians to write this stuff?  Hey, I bet that’s where the product names come from too!

But the Canon-supplied software does a nice job and has made it VERY easy to boom through my current project, batch-scanning gazillions of mostly B/W family photos.

Today I decided to have a go with some 35mm slides.  After all, Canon advertises this as a film scanner.  And there began a tale that didn’t end well.

When Canon says “film” it turns out that they mean “strips of unmounted film”.  I learned this from various reviews that I ran across while trying to figure out how, exactly, one scans slides.  The answer:  One Doesn’t.  It just doesn’t DO that.

And while I might have experimented with removing the film chips from the slide mounts in order to scan “film”, the same reviews unanimously complained about the awful results from even unmounted film scanning.

I don’t feel particularly abused, since the scanner does what I bought it for and does it well.  And instead of worrying about where to store the goofy film scanning attachment so I can find it the next time I need it, I can just toss it out.

Net:  Nice scanner for flat documents but if you  want to scan film (mounted or not), keep looking.  You don’t want to wave your credit card over this one.

April 2014 updates solve resolution problems with PowerPoint 2013 image exports!

Good news!

 

The updates for PowerPoint 2013 released in mid April, 2014 solve the poor-quality image export problem I reported earlier.

 

And then some.

 

You can now, with a bit of trickery, export images at over 13,000 pixels wide.

 

Depending on the size of your slide to begin with, that's over 1000 dpi.

 

Watch here for announcements about an upcoming version of PPTools Image Exporter that’ll take advantage of this lovely new feature.

 

 

 

iPhone? iNtuitive?

Sometimes stuff on the Mac or iThings is truly brilliant and intuitive.

And other times ….  Well.

Example:

I’ve got a sound file that’s been my alarm tone on every device that does alarms since the Win95 days.  It amuses me.  It amuses John Wilson when we share a room at Presentation Summit.  It’s one of my Japanese "daughters" kids screaming “WAKE UP!” in Japanese.

On every moderatelysmart phone I’ve had so far, it’s been easy to move sound files onto the phone to use as ringtones.

Typically, the phone’s Windows software has some kind of file manager you can use to move your sound file to the phone. Then you pick the file as your ring or alarm tone and you're done

Heck, even on my wife's old NoKia Brainless, you could at least use the built in voice recorder to record a sound and pick it as your ring tone.

On the iPhone … OMG. If I didn’t like the thing for other reasons, I’d have to crush it.

I wanted to use the same sound file as always on it.  I found out how you go about this:

You stare at it for a while and realize that you have no IDEA how to move files to it.

You look on the interwebs and find that there IS a way of doing it.  It needs iTunes.  Luckily, you already have that because you need it to synch the phone with Outlook.  But if not, you spend the time to download and install and update and yadayada.

You fire it up and … huh?  The thing they described on the web site doesn’t seem to be there.  More staring.  Finally, you realize that on the pane in question, there’s not one, not two but THREE different scrollbars.  If you use the outermost one, you are rewarded with The Voila Experience.

Sort of.  But not yet because you’re not sure which app to drag the file into.  More interwebulating.   It seems you need Garage Band to convert sounds to ringtones.  So you go to download that. Or try to. And finally, after five or twenty tries when the download times out, you finally get it installed.  Then back into iTunes to get the sound dropped into Garage Band so you can open it and convert.

And soon you realize why some of the other stuff is so intuitive.  It's because they sucked all the intuitive out of Garage Band and used it elsewhere.  You want to open your pathetic little file and just save it, do you? You fool. That’s not how we DO things on this planet.

No, you have to start a new project and record yourself cursing Jobs or use one of the (admittedly pretty cool) built-in instruments … anything that’s built-in so as to put something, anything into the project.  NOW you can switch to the track editor and stumble around trying to remember where in HELL the thingie that let you add drumbeats and other pre-recorded stuff went.  And finally …. FINALLY … there’s your sound file, the one you dragged in how many hours ago was it?

Drop it onto the track editor, move it around … cool thing, the track editor.  There IS a bit of intuitive left in here after all. Delete the dummy sound you had to record just to GET to the track editor and save your ..

Save your …?

Well no.  There’s no save, there is only go back to My Sounds.  Ah.

But it autosaved for you.

But if IT does the save, how do you …

Ah. If you hold down the sound’s icon … press and hold … and note that there’s no help, no hint, no tooltips here … you get to a place where you can mail or facebook or airwhatever OR SAVE AS RINGTONE.

And now … NOW … we can go into the sound choices for ringtones ‘n stuff and our new sound is there.  And it works.  In only 573 steps more than it would have taken on the dumbest smartphone out there.

Thank god it was so INTUITIVE.

Move PowerPoint files to/from PC/Mac/iPad/iPod/iPhone

There are all kinds of ways to move files between IOS devices (iPods, iPads etc) and Macs/PCs, but they all seem to require that both device and computer be connected to the internet.

What if you’re in one of those situations where your connection is slow.  Or unreliable.  Or there IS no connection?  Are you out of luck?

No.  And this new PPT FAQ article explains how to get the job done with nothing more than the computer, the IOS device, iTunes and a USB cable.

http://www.pptfaq.com/FAQ01187-Move-files-from-iPod-iPad-iPhone-to-PC-and-back.htm

Deals on Office videos

PowerPoint MVP  and Empress of Templates, Echo Swinford’s video is on sale

Office 2013 SP1 doesn't fix the problem with poor quality image exports

Sigh.  I was hoping to be able to report to you that the recently released Service Pack 1 (SP1) for Office 2013 solves PowerPoint 2013’s poor-quality image export problem, but unfortunately not.

Though they’re aware of it, Microsoft has chosen not to fix the problem for now.

So where does that leave us?  Well, if you use any of the PPTools add-ins that export images, I strongly suggest that you do NOT upgrade to Office 2013.

That would be:

PPT2HTML

PPT2HTML Batch

ImageExport

Protect

In most cases, you won’t notice huge differences in PPT2HTML/PPT2HTML Batch because by and large you won’t be exporting to high resolution images for use in HTML. 

But ImageExport’s main use is creating high resolution images from PowerPoint, and PowerPoint 2013 simply won’t cooperate.  If you really NEED high rez images, don’t upgrade until Microsoft sees fit to fix what they’ve broken.  We can’t do it.  It’s up to them.

When/if they fix it, we’ll let you know here. Immediately. 

 

Office 2013 Service Pack 1 (SP1) now available

Microsoft has released Service Pack 1 for Office 2013.

If you have one of the so-called Click To Run versions, you'll get the update automatically, unless you've disabled auto-updates.  Most users will have the Click To Run version.

If you have an MSI-installed (Enterprise) version of Office 2013, you can use Microsoft Update or go to http://support.microsoft.com/kb/2817430 which gives details about the Service Pack and includes links to both the 32- and 64-bit SPs.

 

Nolan Haims to be speaker at Presentation Summit

Nolan Haims, the newest Microsoft MVP for PowerPoint, will be one of the keynote speakers at Presentation Summit in San Diego, October 12-14.

I’m delighted because I’ll finally be able to keep an eye on the Help Center there AND hear Nolan speak.

Rick Altman, conference organizer, is happy because he won’t have to lug furniture around any more.

Or as he puts it “The decision to offer Nolan a keynote was a no-brainer for me, because when he was in the tracks, practically everyone went to his seminars. We got tired of lining up chairs in the foyer outside the breakout rooms!”

Image Resolution Gotcha

Here’s a weird one for you.

An old PowerPoint trick is to set a registry entry that controls the resolution of images that you save from PowerPoint.

For example, if you set the registry entry to 200, then PowerPoint will save your images at 200 pixels per inch; for a standard 10” wide slide, that’d be 2000 pixels (10 inches times 200 pixels per inch). 

If you have an add-in like our <a href=http://www.pptools.com/imageexport/>ImageExport</a> or write your own code using PowerPoint’s Slide.Export method, you can control the resolution yourself, so you don’t need to bother with this registry entry.

Or do you?  There’s a problem.  If this registry entry is set and you or your add-in call for a higher resolution export, you get a corrupted image, at least from PowerPoint 2010.  You end up with a partially correct image in the upper left corner but the rest of the image will be gray.

Solution:  remove the registry entry if you see this effect.

The registry entry in question is at:

HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Office\14.0\PowerPoint\Options\ExportBitmapResolution

Delete it and all will be well.

New Presentation Summit video sums it all up

Rick Altman and his crew* have produced a video that really captures the spirit of Presentation Summit.

http://vimeo.com/85310302

This year, Presentation Summit will be in San Diego, CA October 12-15

*Crew:  Ric, the staff and the patrons.  The family, is what we’re saying here.  See the video.  Understand why.

But I want to enter sizes in Points. Or Metric.

If you’re in the U.S. or have your copy of Windows set to use US locale settings for measurements, PowerPoint wants you to enter size/position information in inches.

Since you’re in the U.S. or have your copy of Windows set to use US locale settings for measurements, this is perfectly reasonable.

Unless you’re trying to create work for a client anywhere else on the planet who, reasonably enough, wants to specify dimensions in metric.

Or you’re working with experienced DTP people who want to work in points and picas.  Or YOU want to.

The surprising thing is that you can. All you have to do is tell PowerPoint what units to use when you plug in your numbers.

Instead of getting out your calculator and working the conversions to inches, just type the actual measurement you want, then (no spaces) type:

 pt for Points, pi for Picas

 cm for Centimeters, mm for millimeters

And if your system’s set to a sensible measurement system but you just HAVE to use inches, in for Inches

Are there other units available?  Not that I’ve found, but hey, I just this evening discovered that pi works. Who knows what further treasures lurk?

Oh. One more tip in case you decide to go exploring:  type the number followed by your best guess as to the “mystery unit abbreviation” then press the Tab key.  If PowerPoint resets the measurement to the original measurement in inches, your best guess wasn’t good enough.  It’s a dud.  If the measurement changes (still in inches but to a new number), you’ve struck gold.  Well.  Something cool to win bar bets with, anyhow.  In bars where seriously geeky people hang out.  But still … neat.

Of course, you have to plug in a number that, converted to inches, would be a different number of inches that’s showing currently.  If the shape you’re messing about with is 10 inches wide and you change it to 2587rmk, the equivalent of 10 inches, expressed in Romulan Mikrons, you don’t have a winner.

You just have something that PPT doesn’t understand. It’s not bowing to your will.  It’s ignoring you.

 

PowerPoint 2013 lockups

I’ve run across this little gem a couple times lately. I’ll be working in PowerPoint 2013, everything’s going swimmingly, then I’ll click the Design tab and …

 

And nothing.  PowerPoint locks up.  Completely.  And nearly locks up the system with it.

 

Any work in progress is lost, and it can take several minutes even to get Task Manager up in order to kill the POWERPNT.EXE process.

 

I thought an Office repair had sorted it out, but darned if it didn’t bite me again today.  And here’s what I found out:

 

If I use the little widget in the upper right corner of the PowerPoint screen, the icon to the right of the ? icon and tell PowerPoint to Show Tabs, as opposed to Show Tabs and Commands (the default), then the next time I start PowerPoint and touch the Design tab … instant PPTDeath.

 

If I quit PowerPoint with Show Tabs and Commands set, it’s in that mode when I restart and I can then tell it to show just tabs. 

 

That is, I can do that if I want to take a chance on forgetting to reset it and getting whacked (again!) later on.

 

Nah.  I think I’ll just consider this a dangerously broken feature (a “killer feature” in a very real sense!) and slap my hand every time I even think about using it from now on.

 

 

High quality image exports from PowerPoint 2013? No, sorry.

It’s a sad thing. 

 

With a bit of registry wizardry or some VBA, we’ve always been able to export slides to PNG, JPG and other image formats at much higher resolutions than the default 960 pixel jobbies PowerPoint gives you when you do a Save As and choose one of these formats.

 

You still can.  Unless you “upgrade” to Office 2013.  If you do that, you’ll find that PowerPoint will cheerfully produce images at high-pixel-counts, but if you look closely at the results, you’ll see that they’re blurry. Fuzzy.  Unsharp. Nasty. 

 

They look for all the world as though PowerPoint has exported them at its default 960 pixel resolution then upsampled to the final resolution.  In other words, PowerPoint has exported a low resolution image and invented the extra pixels to pad it out to high resolution.  Ick.

 

So.  What can you do about it?

 

If you plan to use PowerPoint to produce images to be printed as posters or in journals as many scientist/academic PowerPoint users do, don’t plan to do it with PowerPoint 2013.  If you can, stick with an earlier version of PowerPoint, even as far back as 2000 (but if you use 2007, be sure it’s updated with any available service packs … early releases had their own evil ways with image exports).  Your eyes, your publisher and your readers will thank you.

 

If you’re stuck with Office 2013, consider saving your slides as PDF and submitting the PDF to the printer/journal.  Any of them worth their salt should be able to handle PDFs, and the results will be far superior.

 

If you’re considering an upgrade to Office 2013, understand that low-quality images are the downside.  You can always install one of the click-to-run editions alongside your existing earlier Office installation and use the most appropriate version for the task at hand.   Or leave your money in your pocket until Microsoft finally decides to fix this problem. 

 

 

 

Change your language, lose your data.

Microsoft, shame on you.  You’re throwing away our data with only the thinnest, shabbiest pretense at warning us.

 

It turns out that you’ll delete all of your Outlook QuickParts (and possibly other customizations) when you change language settings in PowerPoint (and possibly in Word/Excel and the others … they share the same dangerous dialog box).

 

Change the default language and your data is deleted.  It’s not restored when you switch back to your original language.   I said “deleted” and meant it.  It’s dead, Jim.  Gone.

 

So if you need to change the default language in any Office app, be sure to back up %APPDATA%\Microsoft\Templates\NormalEmail.dotm first. That’s where Outlook stores the QuickParts data and that’s what you’ll need to restore it after Microsoft deletes it for you.

 

The specific dialog box that does the damage is at Review | Language | Language Settings.

 

When you choose a different language and click Set as Default, you get a vague warning that some of your customizations might be deleted, fonts and oh gosh, maybe some other stuff. 

 

Nuh-uh.  Click OK and all your QuickParts are gone.  Forever.

 

If you depend on QuickParts in Outlook at all, you might want to finish this sentence, then go back up that file.  

 

New version of Merge available

There’s a new version of PPTools Merge available at:

http://www.pptools.com/downloads.htm

 

No new features, but it fixes a couple of annoying little bugs:

 

FIXED:

In Presentations mode, you could Browse for an output folder but the folder you chose wouldn’t replace whatever was previously in the output text box.

It now works properly.

 

FIXED:

In Presentations mode, if you used @filename and specified full paths to your output files, the paths weren’t respected.

Merge now creates the files as specified.

 

 

Use PowerPoint to make Facebook home page images

Getting the image size JUST RIGHT for your Facebook home page can be a trial.  Or more accurately, a trial and error, trial and error, trial and error until you finally get it right.

How about a way of nailing it in one shot, right from PowerPoint?  Interested?  We got you covered.

Facebook wants an image of exactly 720 pixels wide by 267 pixels high.

Set the page size (Design | Page Setup) first, before you add any shapes, text or graphics to the slide. If you change the page size afterward, you'll distort the graphics.

In most cases, PowerPoint exports images at 96 pixels to the inch, meaning if you set your page size to exactly 7.5" wide by 2.781" high you'll get an image of exactly the right size, or close enough for Facebook work, when choose File | Save As and pick PNG as the file type to save as.

Of course, if you have our Image Export add-in for PowerPoint, it's even simpler.  Set the page size to anything that's proportional to the final size Facebook wants: 7.2" wide by 2.67" high, for example. Then create your graphics, and finally, use Image Export to export the slide at 720x267 pixels.

There’s a free demo of Image Export at http://www.pptools.com/imageexport/

Old tricks sometimes have sharp teeth

There’s an old trick for getting higher resolution images out of PowerPoint.  You add a special key to the registry here:

HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Office\14.0\PowerPoint\Options

For other PowerPoint versions, you'd substitute the appropriate number for 14.0 above ... 15.0 for PPT 2013, 12.0 for PPT 2007, 11.0 for 2003 and so on.  Yep. There's no version 13.0.  And we hear they don't allow black cats on the MS campus either.  Sheesh.

Anyhow ...

The key is a DWORD named ExportBitmapResolution with its value set to the resolution in pixels that you want PowerPoint to produce when you save a presentation as JPG/PNG/etc.   For example, if you set ExportBitmapResolution to 3000, you’ll get images 3000 pixels across instead of the default 960 pixel images when you save your slides as images.

So far, so good.

But it turns out that if you use VBA code or an add-in that exports images and you set the ExportBitmapResolution to a lower value than the code/add-in calls for, you get useless results:  you get a chopped off image of part of the slide in the upper left corner of your image.  The rest of the image is filled with gray or black.  

You get this:

When you should be getting this:

The fix is to delete the registry entry.  Let the code do the work, not the registry.  

There's more about it here, including pictures.

http://www.pptools.com/imageexport/FAQ00038.htm

Change the icon or description of an embedded object

When you insert an object, you have the option to display it as an icon. PowerPoint
supplies the descriptive text that appears under the icon.

But what if you decide later that you want a different icon? Or different text
beneath the icon?

Easy.

Rightclick the object

Point to [Whatever] Object

Click Convert

Click Change Icon

In the resulting dialog box, you can change the icon and also the text that appears
under the icon.

Bingo.

--
Steve Rindsberg
http://www.pptools.com
http://www.pptfaq.com

Read this. Then BURN it !

Finally, a legitimate excuse for Papyrus. Impact. Haettenschweiler (German for "Kill it before it breeds")

Read more:
http://www.salon.com/books/laura_miller/2011/01/18/hideous_fonts

Now that you've read it, burn this message. We don't want this getting out.

--
Steve Rindsberg
http://www.pptools.com/
http://www.pptfaq.com/

Opera Widgets

Opera may be the neatest browser on the planet. Think "Vista widgets" and then backspace over that and mentaltype "Duh. Opera's had widgets for a couple years now. More of them. Useful ones."

AAMOF I'm posting this to the blog using a little HTML editor/previewer widget that also knows how to post stuff here.

Couldnt' be simpler. http://www.opera.com

Opera. Life is good.