A few weeks ago, I wrote that I thought ISO adoption of Microsoft’s OOXML was a good thing because a practical standard that everyone followed was more valuable than a noble standard that everyone ignored. Well, it turns out that OOXML is actually the standard that no one follows. As Stephe Walli points out, Microsoft Office 2007 does not support OOXML. So what good is a standard that no one supports? No good at all. At least OpenDocument is supported by multiple applications.
But complex layout standards are a tricky business because it is difficult to write a complete and clear specification that covers so much detail. Just look at the HTML standard and browser compatibility. Joel Spolsky writes eloquently on that topic here. And HTML is designed to be much simpler than an office format.
If the ultimate goal is to allow people with different software applications to collaborate on layout intensive documents, I don’t know if we are ever going to get there. As an experiment, I took a report written in NeoOffice and opened it and saved it in Apple TextEdit (which claims ODF support). When I re-opened the document in NeoOffice, much of the formatting was stripped out. I am still waiting for Lotus Symphony’s promised Mac release. That will be a better test of round-trip collaboration.
My true hope is that less collaborative content development is done in documents and more through server based tools such as wikis. I think the average knowledge worker is moving in that direction. Tools like Zoho Office and Google Docs are helping here a great deal. These tools allow the collaborative process to happen in a storage neutral way and then give options as to what format the content is published in (PDF, ODF, OOXML – or whatever MS Office really is).
Powerpoint as the Deliverable
Friday, September 19th, 2008Increasingly, I am finding that clients prefer a slide deck (i.e. MS Powerpoint) as a deliverable rather than a regular document. The reality is that many people don’t really read documents and would rather their consultants not waste the time writing words that will not be read. As a consultant, I usually find myself having mixed feelings. On the one hand, I don’t like the idea of typing prose into a vacuum (and contribute to the tangle of content that they may have hired me to solve). On the other hand, at the end of the project, I normally have a lot to say and it is difficult to squeeze all this information into a slide deck that can be left behind and stand on its own. The resulting product tends to look like an epic novel is coffee-table book format – or like the slides in this You Tube clip.
Slides were meant to accompany a presentation and the best presenters only use them for visual cues to complement what they say. Slides written in this philosophy leave too much to interpretation without the presenters explanation. When my deliverable is a slide presentation I get around this limitation by packing a lot of explanation in the speakers notes. Recently, I have gone so far as to make foot notes in the slide that reference points I make in the speakers notes. The result is this strange hybrid that I am not quite sure how to characterize. It is essentially a document-like narrative organized around bold themes. People can just browse through the themes and drill into topics that are of interest. However, I suspect that few readers actually do this.
Sites like SlideShare ask slides to stand on their own and, therefore, seem to favor wordy slides. The ones with just pictures leave the reader in the dark imagining what the presentation must have been about. I have felt the compulsion to write presentation slides for a SlideShare reader and wonder if other presenters think this way too. In the extreme, I could see a presentation turn into a group reading of paragraphs of narrative. I hope that it does not come to that.
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