On my previous post, New interface for Office 2003 add-ins, I commented that I was excited by the prospect of using the exact same UI in PowerPoint 2007 and previous versions. In fact, I have been able to implement this new concept in my upcoming add-in, PowerMerge in just a couple of days. Great for me!

But wait, "the devil is in the details" they say. And I have discovered that it is not as easy as it seemed at first.

My new interface works like a charm if my add-in is the only one using the advanced task panes feature. But, as I said, I plan to implement this UI in all my add-ins. So what happens if PowerPoint, or Word, are running two or more add-ins that use this "ribbon"?

At the top, you can see the nicely formatted "ribbon" that closely resembles the true ribbon of PowerPoint 2007.

At the bottom, there is how this same "ribbon" would look if a second add-in tries to place its own "ribbon". A header is drawn on top of the task pane to let the user select the appropriate "ribbon" to work with. Unfortunately the task pane height is not modified and the top of the "ribbon" is effectively hidden by the header.

The effect is not nice. So, I have to work out a solution. Time to contact Add-in-Express support again.

As I have mentioned before, I was intending to replicate the look and feel of the ribbon interface in previous versions of Word and PowerPoint.

It’s official now. I can implement ribbons on Office 2003

After working on this idea, I think I have got a good solution to implement the idea as can be seen in the screen shot below:

The upper half is the ribbon tab of PowerMerge, as seen on PowerPoint 2007.

The bottom half is my new "custom" ribbon tab, as it looks on PowerPoint 2003 (and older versions).

As you can see, the effect is not perfect, but sufficient for my purposes, especially since the PowerPoint 2003 users can’t make a direct comparison between my ribbon and Microsoft’s ribbon.

Now that I think about it, it is funny because people hated the ribbon so much that a product was created to bring back the menus and toolbars of Office 2003 to 2007 while I am doing exactly the opposite.

To be frank, in the particular case of PowerMerge, probably I could make it work using just the toolbar. But PowerTOC will become much more usable when I implement my new custom ribbon system.

Email is not reliable anymore!

I get very frustrated when I receive messages from the web site mail form, answer them but it seems my answer gets lost. I can imagine my customers feeling an even greater frustration, because they don’t even know that their message reached us.

For example, a user of Control Runner has been trying to reach us for more than a month to know how to upgrade to Control Runner 4.0. As it happens, he is entitled to a FREE upgrade and I have already sent him four messages that, apparently, he is not receiving.

Therefore, may I suggest that users than can’t contact us use this blog post to do it.

Here’s how it works:

1. Post your comment.
2. Return to the blog in a few hours to see your comment posted and our answer.

I can confirm that the problem reported in my previous posts has been definitely solved. This means that I will be able to use task panes in all my add-ins, maintaining the compatibility with previous versions (specially 2003, which is still the version used mostly by my clients).

I am thinking also in replicating the ribbon bar interface used by my add-ins in Office 2003 using a task pane.

I personally love the ribbon interface because it allows to group "task" related functions in a very logical and convenient way. Unfortunately I have not been able to take advantage of its full potential because that would have made my add-ins not compatible with previous versions.

For example, I don’t like the ribbon tab used in PowerTOC (shown below). I think that it can be improved substantially to make the application much more intuitive to use.

Compare it with the ribbon of my latest add-in, which is about to enter beta testing, PowerMerge:

And I am sure that I can still do better once I start taking advantage of the possibilities of the ribbon interface.

I thought I was done with the customer support series, but a recent blog post on one of the blogs I monitor, Software Marketing News is so related to my own posts that I have to comment on it.

On the one hand, I totally agree with them. Generally, an unhappy customer can do a lot of damage, so companies have better to solve reported problems.

On the other hand, I found it funny that I have just written three posts because I wanted to thank publicly two companies that provide first class customer support.

Of course, I still agree with them when they say that it is unusual for a happy customer to do what I have just done, writing about how happy I am with their support.

How to tell if a company will succeed?

I believe that hearing what problems have your customers is one of the best ways to succeed. It is not a belief that comes from analyzing business strategies. I know it from experience.

In the past, I have had the opportunity to criticize the products or services of companies owned by people I personally know. I tell them the problems I have spotted, with the intention of helping them.

Doing so, I have come across a law that, so far, has proved universally valid:

1. Companies owned by a person that gets annoyed when a person that they know criticize their companies, fail.
2. On the other hand, owners that thank people making a criticism of their company, and try to solve the cause of the criticism afterwards, have an above average chance of become successful.

It is a pity that I didn’t know this law when I worked as a Private Equity investor. I would have used it much to my benefit to determine if I had to recommend an investment.

What is worse than a noisy unhappy customer?

A silent unhappy customer.

One of the frequent discussions I have with my wife is when we get an awful service at a restaurant or a shop and we consider whether we should complain about the service or not.

My reasoning for not complaining is threefold.

• The service is so awful that the owner should belong to my first category.
• Therefore, the owner is not going to be very pleased when he hears my complains.
• For the above two reasons, I don’t see why should I have a hard time trying to help someone that is not going to thank me and will not use my advice anyway.

So, I take a mental note to never return to the restaurant or shop, and I really do it. My wife, being a better person than I am, still believes that we should try and help the guy in charge, but she gets so violent complaining, than finally she lets it pass.

On either case, they have lost two customers and, still worse, they have no idea why. That really hurts.

On my consulting business, I do a lot of data sharing between Excel and InDesign.

I know that InDesign tables have very powerful formatting options, but my reports usually contain dozens of interconnected tables that have to be created in Excel (because they contain financial calculations). Excel does provide with enough formatting options to create great looking tables that integrate nicely with the layout of my reports, while InDesign, of course, lacks any calculation power.

Download now Metafile eXpert, or continue reading to know the whole story about effectively working with Excel tables in InDesign.

Placing Excel tables in InDesign. The traditional way

InDesign provides two "modes" of handling the clipboard as shown below. The options are available (in Windows systems) in Edit > Preferences > Clipboard handling …

Paste Text Only

You really should not copy and paste tables created in Excel to InDesign using the Text Only mode. If you don’t follow my advice and do it, the table is converted to text, with each row in a line, and columns separated by tabs. This is hardly useful.

It is necessary to completely reformat the table in InDesign, and merged cells usually create problems. But the worse news is, whenever the original data changes (and believe me, it will), you have to copy, paste and reformat it again from scratch. Definitely a no-no.

Paste All Information

Ok, so what happens if you try the first option, ‘Paste All information’. That looks more promising.

In this case, what InDesign does is to try and convert the Excel table into an InDesign table, thriving to  retain all formatting information it can.

As seen above, if you take the precaution of hiding gridlines in Excel, the result is no so bad.

[BTW, I always hide the gridlines anyway, because I find they are distracting when working with Excel, so it is not a big deal for me.]

InDesign really does a great job of converting the Excel table into a InDesign table. There are still a few glitches, like the width and height of cells not being maintained, the vertical alignment being odd and, again, problems with merged cells. So, even if the result is fairly good, you will have to manually tweak and adjust the conversion. And this means that you will have to reformat tables again whenever the underlying information changes. Not really a viable solution.

Using the metafile clipboard format

The problem lies in that, even though Excel pastes to the clipboard the data in mutiple formats, InDesign only uses two of these formats: The internal Excel clipboard format to create an InDesign table, or the text only format, to create a tab delimited text object.

But there is a third way which involves using the metafile format. What is a metafile? Is a vector file format that has been used in Windows, at least since Windows 3.0. Being a vector format means that it has maximum quality. And it provides a really good rendition of the original formatting of the spreadsheet because it is the format that is used by Excel itself to print a spreadsheet on some printers.

The funny thing (so to speak) is that InDesign does understand metafiles (in fact, most applications do) but it ignores it unless it is the only available format.

Excel provides a little known trick to remove all other clipboard formats and publish only a metafile. How do you do it? To put it mildly, it is not terribly intuitive in Excel 2007. The following screen shot shows how to do it:

• Select the range you want to copy.
• Click on the little arrow below the Paste button
• Select the last option ‘As Picture’.
• A new dialog will be shown with a few options.

You will get better results selecting the ‘As shown when printed’  option. You may have noticed that Excel is not a perfect WYSIWIG ("What you see is what you get") application. Selecting this option means that Excel will effectively compose the metafile as if it were printing the selected range.

Usually, it doesn’t really matter which Appearance option you select.

The Format options are more important. As you can see, when using the ‘As printed’ option you can’t choose a Format, because Excel forces the Picture format for you (remember I told you Excel uses metafiles to print?). But in case you decide to use ‘As shown on screen’, you have to absolutely make sure that you stick to the Picture format (in case you are wondering, picture is a MS synonym for metafile).

You don’t want to use a bitmap. Believe me.

It is fairly easy to create a macro in Excel to replicate all these clicks and selections and copy the selected cells as metafile to the clipboard to paste it afterwards in InDesign. In fact that is what I did in the past, with good results.

Updating metafile tables

What happens when the table changes? Easy, for each table yo need to update, you repeat the process in Excel, then turn to InDesign, delete the old table, paste it again, and back to Excel. Easy … but tedious.

[NOTE: Of course, if you are a brave person, you can try to link the table in InDesign. I am not brave enough myself and have been avoiding using linking since the very day Microsoft invented it, but you might be different]

Introducing Metafile eXpert. A better way to handle Excel tables in InDesign

To streamline the process, a couple of years ago I created a personal quick and dirty utility to capture the metafile format posted by Excel to the clipboard (remember that Excel always publishes metafiles when copying to the clipboard) and save it to disk. Then, I’d "place" the metafile in InDesign, as I would any other external "asset".

Recently I have been investigating the clipboard in more detail for an upcoming add-in I am working with, (the name is WordClip and it is a boilerplate repository for Word). As a result I have greatly enhanced my little metafile utility and decided to release it to the world as a freeware utility. If you work with Excel tables in InDesign you absolutely must get it. And the price is quite reasonable!

You can see below a screen shot of Metafile eXpert.

What’s the deal with Metafile eXpert?

• First of all, it keeps record of your projects and the location of your "assets" folder for each.
• It "monitors" the clipboard. That means that you can copy a bunch of Excel tables without having to move back and forth between Excel, Metafile eXpert and InDesign.
• You don’t have to create a macro to replicate the "trick" I have presented above. The good old Ctrl+C key combination in Excel will get the work done.
• Placing metafiles inside InDesign means that you don’t have to delete and paste again the tables back in InDesign. When you return to your publication, InDesign detects that the metafiles have changed on disk and you can update them all with a few clicks!
• You get a full preview of the tables to ensure that they look like you want, right inside Metafile eXpert. And, by the way, Metafile eXpert, is a truly WYSIWIG application. The preview shows the metafiles exactly as they will print.

So, what are you waiting for?

Please Contact me if you find Metafile eXpert useful. And be sure to let me know your suggestions to make it even more productive.

Where are my metafiles?

Metafile eXpert saves metafiles using the Enhanced Meta Files format, with the extension EMF. When you open the Place dialog you wont see the metafiles, because Adobe has not included EMF as one of the extensions in the default "Importable files" option. Therefore you have to select the "Windows Enhanced Meta Files" in the Place dialog.

This is the third installment of this series. On Part I, I rumbled about the craziness of not providing good technical support, while on Part II and III, I am providing concrete samples of what I consider to be top notch support.

The case of the non-closing PowerPoint application

About a month ago, I discovered that Add-in-Express 2009 has introduced a very cool new feature. The ability to create windows like the tasks panes introduced on Office 2007 in older versions of Office. They call this feature "advanced task panes".

Many of my users are still using Word and PowerPoint 2003. This has prevented me taking full advantage of what I believe is a great interface for add-ins. In the future, most of my add-ins are going to include at least one of these advanced task panes.

For example, below is shown the user interface of my new PowerMerge addin, showing a task pane with the fields used on the presentation.

Right after implementing my very first advanced task pane, I compile and run the add-in and it shows beautifully on PowerPoint. The only problem is that PowerPoint refuses to close. It simply hides itself and continues running in the background.

What technical support was supposed to be

This is no good, so I send an email to Add-in-Express technical support. I recall that at some point in the past, I discovered a bug in their implementation of Office 2007 task panes in PowerPoint, so I ask them if they have checked their new advanced task panes with PowerPoint.

I receive their answer: "Yes, they have checked and they work". And a suggestion: "Maybe there is a conflict with another add-in installed on my system. Can I please check?".

I do check, and indeed there are two add-ins that seem to "cause" the problem. One is the PowerPoint recording add-in of TechSmith’s Camtasia Studio and the other is the add-in for a text-to-speech application. I report that information to them.

The support guy at Add-in-Express downloads the trial of the text-to-speech application and discovers that the add-in is a "feature" of the commercial version. So, he contacts me to ask if I can contact the vendor to explain my problem and ask for a "trial" version of the add-in for them to make their tests.

I, therefore, contact the vendor of the text-to-speech application. In a couple of days, I receive the following answer:

[Name supressed] addin toolbars are stable. You can try again.
Sorry, we have no trail (sic) version of full version.

I won’t comment on this message. But, I’d like to say that I am actively looking for an alternative text-to-speech solution, and I regret the day I purchased that one.

Since the text-to-speech route seems to be a road block, I contact TechSmith to tell them the problem and know what might cause it. The support guy there tells me that he’s spoken with a developer who suspects that the problem is related to their add-in hooking into some of PowerPoint events (as most PowerPoint add-ins do). So, I pass on the information, hoping that it is useful.

I don’t know if Add-in-Express developers have carefully studied their code, or they have installed Camtasia Studio in a test system and debugged PowerPoint. Whatever method they have used, yesterday I received the following message from them:

We have fixed this issue. The fix will be available in the next release.

So, in summary, in the month or so that has taken to sort out this thing, Add-in-Express support staff:

• Have taken full responsibility for the problem.
• Provided a useful suggestion, hours after receiving the first notice of the problem.
• Downloaded the evaluation version of the text-to-speech program, only to discover that the add-in was a "feature" of the commercial version.
• Finally, solved the problem as soon as they found a way to reproduce it.

All of that without ever "scalating" the issue or suggesting that the problem was not their fault since it only occurred when other third party components were present on the system.

Thank you very much, again, Add-in-Express.

Update: Today I have received a notice from Add-in-Express saying that they have a new version available that solves the problem. Hurrah!

This is a continuation of my previous post. The first one was a little negative, so I’d like to present the other face of this issue. There are indeed software companies that thrive to provide a good customer support.

My products use a number of third party components. Of these, there are two that are extremely important to me:

1. The protection system. I am using Oreans WinLicense to protect all my applications and add-ins.
2. The office add-in framework. I am using Add-in-Express as the basis to create all the add-ins.

These two components have two things in common: A great portion of the "hard to track bugs" found on my products are caused by, or related to, these two components. On the other hand, the support provided by these two companies is absolutely top-notch.

I don’t know if there are other products that would perform the same functions for me and are better, or cheaper. I don’t care. Their support is so good that I won’t look for an alternative solution to those two backbone functions. Period.

The Oreans history

I have had many support needs for them. This is not strange because their protection system is likely to cause all kind of conflicts with running applications -as an example, for security reasons, my applications are not allowed to run when a debugger is detected- or cause my executables to be flagged as a virus.

Last week, I received a bug report from a customer that had just purchased PowerTOC. I hate when someone purchases a license, and immediately tells me that the product won’t work. I really feel very bad about it.

To make things worse, the problem was totally new to me. PowerPoint will crash on startup and disable PowerTOC on the next run. This is a serious issue.

I offered a remote assistance session to the customer, which he accepted. Fortunately, just before starting the remote session, the customer discovered that the "culprit" was McAfee HIPS. Disabling it solved the problem.

Time to contact Oreans, I thought. I sent them a message and, in a few hours I received a very detailed answer with a possible solution to this problem. I have followed their advice, and it seems to work.

The Add-in-Express history

This is what originally made me write this series, and will be the topic of another post. Please keep tuned.