This page contains information relating to the use of OfficeFX Presenter with PowerPoint 2007.
Note: If available, we recommend using PowerPoint 2003 (or PowerPoint 2002) for all production work involving OfficeFX Presenter. Please note that PowerPoint 2003 can be installed side-by-side along with PowerPoint 2007 on a single machine if your license from Microsoft gives you permission to do so. Just be sure to install PowerPoint 2003 after installing PowerPoint 2007.
In any case, be sure to install Office 2007 Service Pack 1 before using OfficeFX Presenter with PowerPoint 2007.
Pictures and Images
Occasionally pictures or other images (charts, graphs, etc.) in PowerPoint 2007 may disappear or appear incorrectly in OfficeFX Presenter. In particular, PowerPoint 2007 Smart Objects often have this problem. This is due to a bug in the PowerPoint programming interface and it can be triggered whether OfficeFX is installed or not. Until this issue is resolved by Microsoft, it may help to import any problem images again. If source images are not readily available, you can right click on an image frame and choose "Save as image" from the right-click menu. You can then use the resulting image to replace the original in PowerPoint. This usually allows the image to appear in correctly OfficeFX, but the details surrounding exactly when this works are fuzzy.
Bullet Size and Placement
Because the PowerPoint 2007 programming interface has a bug that causes the Rulers object to contain no useful data, we can not obtain information regarding precise bullet placement or sizing. We have tried to make a good approximation, but precise data is simply unavailable to us. Using PowerPoint bullets (as opposed to FXTheme bullets, when available) may help.
Bitmap Text
The bitmap text feature works very sporadically in PowerPoint 2007. This is due to a combination of the image export bug described above, along with inconsistent addition / removal of margins in the text images that PowerPoint 2007 produces. Again, we have tried to put in work-arounds for the inconsistent and erroneous results we get from PowerPoint 2007, but for now, Bitmap Text should be used with extreme caution in PowerPoint 2007.
No Support for New Features
The PowerPoint programming interface has not been extended by Microsoft to support access to new features in PowerPoint 2007. This means things like compressed or expanded text, kerning, or text with all-caps, beveling, or reflections can not be supported in OfficeFX Presenter at this time. One possible workaround is to save a PowerPoint 2007 presentation with these features enabled as a PowerPoint 2003 file. When opened in PowerPoint 2003, the text with the new effects present will appear as bitmap images (and hence will no longer be editable in PowerPoint 2003). Those images should display fine in OfficeFX Presenter when running in PowerPoint 2003.
Overall Reliability
When the programming API (especially image and text export) is used over a period of time, PowerPoint 2007 may no longer draw certain slides within the PowerPoint application itself. Again, this seems to be due to recently-introduced bugs in the PowerPoint programming interface. The steps to reproduce this problem vary from file to file. We have not seen a case where work is lost (i.e. exiting and restarting PowerPoint 2007 fixes the problem), but this obviously slows down presentation development.