At MomSoft, we do have a roadmap. Unfortunately we do not have a clear schedule because the development of applications always seems to take much longer than anticipated. For that reason I will not include dates on the description of our plans for the future.

PowerMerge

PowerMerge is in the pipeline. As its name implies it is an addin for PowerPoint that will make it possible to do “mail merges” inside PowerPoint.

We are pretty excited about this product because there isn’t any viable solution (at least that we know of) for such a mundane task as creating a bunch of presentations by replacing variables with the contents of a database.

I have been working on this add-in for some time now, and things are so far progressing quite nicely.

FormsAssistant 2.0

We are in the final design phase of the upcoming version of our flagship product. Development will start right after the release of PowerMerge.

After much consideration, we are planning to introduce four main enhancements:

1. Libraries of form models.
2. New field types.
3. Simplified field markup by moving field settings out of view.
4. A free form filler application to distribute forms to third parties.

Of course, in the future, the first three will be included in PowerForms. Unfortunately the fourth one will not be possible because it would require creating a new PowerPoint from scratch.

To really advance in the definition of the new version, it is vital that we receive feedback from our users.

PowerLinks

I have been playing with the idea of creating PowerLinks to automate the management of linked images, Excel tables and Excel charts inside PowerPoint presentations.

The add-in will serve two purposes:

• Ensure that only the representation of the tables and charts, but not the underlying data, is accessible from the presentation.
• Automate as much as possible the process of updating the presentations when the data changes.

Control Runner 4.0?

Control Runner is showing its age. I am aware of it.

I plan to start working on the design aspects of Control Runner 4.0 right after the release of FormsAssistant 2.0.

So, I guess that I am not going to be bored in the next couple of months.

We have released today officially PowerForms, our new PowerPoint add-in. PowerForms is in fact FormsAssistant for PowerPoint.

With the release of PowerForms we will be able to start fulfilling our plans regarding our Office productivity add-ins line. I explain what is our current vision in the next post.

Meanwhile, enjoy our new product!

Today we have released two minor updates to our Office add-ins: PowerTOC v2.2.1 and FormsAssistant 1.7.1.

These are to be considered maintenance updates. They provide only three enhancements over previous versions.

Multi-monitor awareness

Our add-ins now will behave correctly in multi-monitor systems:

1. All dialogs are opened and shown on the same monitor as the host application. The exception is the main window of FormsAssistant and PowerForms which will opened in the same location as it was opened the previous time.
2. The Fields and Clips window will not cause the window of the host application to jump to the primary monitor as it was doing previously.

Better handling of help files

I have changed the way help files are opened from FormsAssistant and PowerTOC. This should prevent  errors reported on some systems.

Non-linked fields were treated as linked

While working on the new PowerForms add-in, also released today, I discovered that non-linked fields were being treated as linked fields. This has been corrected.

Last week it was brought to my attention that my add-ins do not behave correctly on multi-monitor systems. So I had to quickly setup a multi-monitor test system. I tried MaxiVista which is an amazing software product that can magically convert the screen of any computer on your LAN as an additional monitor.

I have already solved the problem and we will release a new version of PowerTOC and FormsAssistant in the next few days.

A typical scenario would be placing a laptop side by side to your desktop and using it as a second monitor. No extra hardware is needed.

Be warned, having two monitors is addictive!

Last week I posted Favorite features of Control Runner (1) explaining how I have been using the ‘Keep on Top’ hot key of Control Runner to work on two different applications at the same time. This post has become obsolete. I am using MaxiVista now to achieve a much better effect.

For PowerPoint power users

Today I have been browsing the site of MaxiVista and I have discovered a feature of the advanced version which is a must for serious PowerPoint presenters.

The idea is that you open on your PC your presentation in normal view and setup MaxiVista to send the slide show to another computer, connected to the projector. That way you can see your notes while you are doing the presentation and your audience only sees the slides. Brilliant!

On my previous post, what’s in a word? I explain how my poor choosing of keywords for PowerTOC has caused less users reaching our site than would have been possible. On this post, I will show how to use the built in "summary slide" button to create a Summary slide of selected slides of your presentation. Then I will show why PowerTOC is a better solution.

Using the built in "summary slide" button

To create a slide containing the titles selected, or all, slides of your presentation, proceed as follows:

1. Open your presentation and change to the slide sorter view.
2. Select the slides you want to include using Ctrl+Click. To select all slides, press Ctrl+A or Edit > Select all.
3. Click on the Summary slide button on the Slide Sorter toolbar. If the Slide Sorter toolbar is hidden, on the View menu, click Toolbars, and then click on Slide Sorter.

The summary slide is created and placed right before the first slide selected on step 2.

As you can see, it is not difficult, but the built in method just described has some important limitations that are solved with PowerTOC.

Benefits of PowerTOC over the built in summary slide command

1. The summary slide function was removed on PowerPoint 2007. Please look at the explanation on the Microsoft Office site: What happened to the Summary Slide and table of contents options?
2. As you may have noticed, the procedure described above is static. If you make changes to your presentation, the Summary Slide will not be modified and you will have to delete the previous Summary Slide and create a new one from scratch.
3. The Summary Slide thus created gets the general formatting of the normal slide layout. If you want to customize the formatting for the Summary Slide you will lose all changes made if you have to re-create the Summary Slide.
4. The Summary Slide will not include links to the slides, nor the slide numbers.
5. If your presentation is long and you want to include all slides, you will have to manually split the Summary Slide on two or more slides.
6. On PowerPoint versions prior to 2007, you won’t be able to layout the Summary Slide in two columns.

For all these reasons, if you want to create a Table of Contents of your presentation, as opposed to just a Summary Slide, you need an specialized add-in like PowerTOC to do the task.

From time to time I come across companies that offer truly innovative and useful services, at the right price. I plan to provide in this blog small reviews of such companies for the benefit of our own clients.

Last week I was brought to the attention of one of these companies: ICanLocalize. It is just a great idea. It provides basically two services:

• Traditional translation of long texts, such as a web site.
• Instant translation of small texts, using professional translators as interpreters.

One of the innovative ideas of their service is that you don’t pay for already translated work. They have developed a software that analyzes the text to translate and identifies repeating words and phrases so that they don’t get translated again, and you don’t get charged twice for the same work.

The translation rate is also very competitive (just 7 cents per word) and they have thought of the maintenance of the translated materials as they get updated over time. They can do it thanks to the software I just mentioned.

We have been considering localizing our software and web site to French and German. With a service like ICanLocalize it becomes a real possibility for us.

Highly recommended resource!

The saying is that an image is worth a thousand words. I guess in the Internet age that should be "a keyword is worth a thousand words".

Last week I did some SEO (Search Engine Optimization) research on PowerTOC. The reason is that I have been surprised of the few people reaching our site from search sites. When you have the only PowerPoint add-in that creates table of contents of presentations, and your ranking on search engines for "powerpoint table of contents" is high, you are bound to receive a big proportion of people looking for these keywords, aren’t you?

It seems that I made a mistake when I did my initial research for PowerTOC. I have always used the term "Table of Contents" but it seems that most users of PowrePoint use either Summary or Agenda. Therefore potential users of PowerTOC are making searches for "powerpoint summary slide" or "powerpoint agenda slide", and the many variations like "how to create a summary slide in powerpoint".

Of course the search engines won’t treat "table of contents" as a synonym for either "agenda" or "summary" and therefore no pages for PowerTOC won’t be returned in these searches. All these potential customers of PowerTOC are lost.

On my following post "How to create a summary slide on PowerPoint", I will show you how can you generate a summary slide using the built in "Summary slide" button on PowerPoint versions 97 to 2003. I will also explain why PowerTOC is a better solution.