Users that are worth gold

Posted by admin on May 18, 2008 in news, tocs

From time to time a user contacts us with questions or suggestions that immediately turn on the proverbial light bulb on top of my head.

Why didn’t it occurred to me, if it is so obvious?

The last time it has happened to me was when a user complained about PowerTOC insisting in treating Normal slides as normal slides and Title slides as title slides.

Well, it seems obvious to me, was my first reaction. It’s the right thing to do, isn’t it?

Wrong!

I was wrong, of course, at that user made me realize it. So, please bear with me while I explain …

The immutable law of software development

First, let me digress a little to show my point.

The other day I was in the NAB trade show in Las Vegas. My client sells (among other things) a radio automation software, and I took advantage of a little free time to have an engineer demo the application for me.

During the demo he explained to me the difficulties they had with this particular product line, so different to their other lines (radio equipment, i.e. hardware). It seems they get the strangest requests to modify their software to suit the needs of their clients. He pointed out that they lose sales because they can’t run their business as if it was a garage, making custom work for each potential client.

I explained to him that they could take advantage of this fact, making their automation system extensible and creating a community of independent developers that could be hired by their clients to do the needed custom work on top of their standard software. That way everybody wins: they get the sale, the client the odd feature, and a number of micro ISV get business.

The funny thing is that he saw this as a problem, while I have always thought it is one of the greatest advantages of the software business. One of the first lessons I learned when I started MomSoft is:

Software is used for purposes completely different to what the designer had in mind when creating the software.

I recently read an article (I seem to recall it was on PC Magazine) in which there was a great example: using Excel to make tables and lists as opposed to do number crunching and what-if analysis. That should be now the primary use of Excel. The Excel team has taken good note of this use, and Excel includes a number of features best suited to this use.

Back to PowerTOC

I designed PowerTOC, as I always do, with the intention of solving a personal problem. I want to include a Table of Contents on my presentations, but PowerPoint does not include the feature. So I made it.

But of course I designed PowerTOC to handle the kind of presentations I do. I have created and fine tuned over time a number of templates that include layouts to separate the different sections of the presentation. For that reason, PowerTOC notes the layout used on each slide when creating the Table of Contents to determine if a slide is a title slide or a normal slide.

For some reason, the organization of my user does not work that way. They only use Normal slides, and they want to organize the Table of Contents of their presentations, according to the content of the slides, not their layout. And why shouldn’t them?

Introducing PowerTOC version 2.1

The result is the brand new version of PowerTOC we have just released. This new version includes a way for users to overwrite the standard logic used by PowerTOC to determine if a slide is a title slide or a normal slide. It still looks for the layout of each slide, but users are given the possibility of forcing a Normal slide to be considered a title slide. Or, if they want to, they can do the opposite, treating a Title slide as if it were a normal slide.

I know it sounds confusing. Again, this is a consequence of my original design. Since PowerPoint used to have just two layouts: title and normal, I used the same names for the Table of Contents.

For a Table of Contents it probably makes more sense to use Level 1 and Level 2 items. So, in other words, PowerTOC convention is to treat slides with a Title layout (and Section layout on PowerPoint 2007) as Level 1, and all other slides as Level 2. I think that at some point in the future I will change the definition on the program.

I want to thank this user (I haven’t asked him for permission to use his name) for the comments he made that have been the basis of this enhancement to PowerTOC.

And the funny thing is that I find I am using this new facility myself. I feel relieved not to have to rely on the layout of the slide to properly create the Table of Contents of my presentations.