PowerTOC 2.2.4 and FormsAssistant 1.7.5 have been released today. These minor upgrades just solve a minor issue with the Check Install utility that was reporting a security error on Microsoft Office 2007 systems.

(The setup check utility showing a security error)

The security problem was reported on all systems where the default security settings had not being changed, the problem has been solved on version 1.1 of the Setup Check utility that has been added to the new versions of PowerTOC and FormsAssistant.

Today we have released PowerTOC v2.2.3 this version adds some Unicode support to PowerTOC.

I say some support because, although PowerTOC will correctly create a Table of Contents using extended character sets, the title of the Table of Contents still does not support Unicode characters. The reason is that the edit control that is used to enter the Title of the Table of Contents does not yet support Unicode characters.

We are working on this issue which will be solved in the next few weeks.

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.

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.

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.

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.

We have just released version 2.2 of PowerTOC. This new version just adds a new feature, the possibility to place the slide number to the left of the slide title.

This feature has been added by a request from an user. It was something that I considered when I originally planned PowerTOC, and again when redesigning it for version 2.0. The reason why I had not added it before is because, a complete implementation including tabs and indentation of normal slides with respect to title slides is not easily implemented.

Finally, I have reached a compromise. Users don’t get the option of placing a tab between the slide number and the slide title. Instead, the number and the title are always separated by a dot and a space. Therefore, table of contents with numbers on the left have the layout shown below:

I hope the solution is satisfactory. Otherwise, If you can think of a better way, please let me know about it.

It has been our single most important problem with our line of Office productivity add-ins. And the reason why we haven’t been able to keep our development schedule on time.

The problem

Microsoft has been trying to improve the security of users of their Office software for years and has come with a number of schemes to prevent the execution and propagation of viruses (and other malware) in the form of addins for Office applications.

They have basically worked in two different directions:

• Preventing the execution of code not signed.
• Preventing the execution of code not installed on a particular place on the system (a trusted location to use their terminology).

Each version of Office from 2000 to 2007 has implement an slightly different way of handling the security issues. In particular Office 2003 (by far the most popular version of Office used by our customers) uses a security level by default that prevents any add-in to work, unless it is installed on a trusted location.

On top of that, there are a number of different issues that can prevent an add-in to be properly installed, including trying to install it when the host application (Word or PowerPoint) is running, not using an administrator account, and several more.

Whatever the problem, the result is always the same: The toolbar is not shown, and the user has no idea about what might be wrong because there isn’t any error message displayed.

It is impossible for us to know what proportion of our potential clients have had this problem in the past. According to our uninstall survey it has been the most common cause that has prevented our potential customers to try the software.

Therefore it has been a huge problem for us. We have tried several approaches to solve it, like including a topic in the help file, a page in our web site and two demos, explaining the procedure to setup the addin.

Sales for our add-ins have been dropping consistently during 2008, although the volume of visits to the MomSoft site and downloads of our add-ins have remained fairly constant during the period.

The solution?

Finally, around a month ago I had an idea. It is not very difficult to make an utility that looks at all the appropriate places on a computer system to try to determine if an add-in is correctly installed, registered, not disabled and if the security setting of the host Office application is preventing the execution of add-ins.

The result is what I have called the "installation check utility", for lack of a better name. An screenshot of the utility is shown below:

We released new versions of FormsAssistant and PowerTOC last weekend. The new versions include the setup check utility and execute it immediately after finishing the installation. Sales have returned back to the levels of 2007, so maybe I have been able to nail down the problem. Of course, a week is not enough time to know.

I keep my fingers crossed.

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.