A better Presenter View?

[Nate Hekman]

Am I the only person in the world who things the Presenter View sucks? I've
been searching for an alternative and all I see on the web are rave reviews
of it. I definitely think it's better than having no Presenter View at all,
but its UI is far below the standard for Microsoft products.

I want:
- to resize the thumbnail view
- to be able to move the thumbnail view to the bottom if I have a
wide-aspect ratio monitor
- to resize the entire window so it doesn't always take up the whole
screen (covering my Start button etc)
- to be able to use the up/down arrow keys instead of left/right for
switching slides since my projector's remote has up/down buttons but not
left/right. Up/down work without the Presenter View but not with it.
- to be able to edit slides while a slide show is in progress (it works
except that the Presenter View obstructs the editor).

I could go on, but those are my primary gripes. It looks to me like a
feature quickly thrown in at the last second before releasing PowerPoint
2002. I was expecting great improvements with the latest release but the
Presenter View doesn't appear to have been touched.

Is there a third-party PowerPoint Presenter out there I can buy? Can
PowerPoint be extended or controlled using .NET so I can write my own?

Nate

 

[Chirag]

You might want to look at PowerShow add-in at
http://officeone.mvps.org/powershow/powershow.html - it allows you to use
PowerPoint's design views during slide shows and keeps the design views
in-sync with the slide show. The 3-pane design view consisting of slide,
thumbnail and notes can be used and that 3-pane view has resizable panes.
You can also edit the presentation during the slide show.

You can use Shortcut Manager from
http://officeone.mvps.org/ppsctmgr/ppsctmgr.html to assign up and down arrow
keys for navigating slides. This will prevent PowerPoint's design view from
handling the up and down arrow keys and instead will allow you to navigate
through the slides.

- Chirag

OfficeOne Animations - Add over 50 animation effects to PowerPoint
http://officeone.mvps.org/anims/anims.html