PowerPoint X: Beyond Pathetic

Posted by Pierre Igot in: Macintosh
February 23rd, 2003 • 7:15 pm

Of course, as a workaround for the afore-mentioned bug, I thought I’d try to use PowerPoint’s built-in AutoCorrect feature, which can automatically replaced mistyped words such as etre and coté with the appropriate spellings.

I simply cannot believe how buggy PowerPoint X is. You cannot use the keyboard to jump directly to a specific portion of the list of AutoCorrect entries (which already contains hundreds of entries!). You have to scroll up and down manually using the scrolling controls. And then when you try to select an existing entry (to edit or delete it) by clicking on it, it doesn’t work! PowerPoint does not select anything. The only way to select an AutoCorrect entry in PowerPoint X is to type it exactly as it is in the field normally used to add a new entry. If the entry you are typing matches an existing one exactly, then the “Add” button is replaced by “Replace” and the “Delete” button becomes active.

Unbelievable.

Then when you want to add a new entry, if you start typing it the “Add” button becomes active, but is not highlighted in blue like it normally should be in order to indicate that you can click on it by hitting the return or enter key. You can click on it by hitting the return or enter key, but there’s no visual indication of this.

Unbelievable.

We are talking about Human Interface 101 issues here. This is a package that retails for several hundred dollars! In an normal, competitive software market, this program would have been dead and buried long ago.

Beyond pathetic.


Comments are closed.

Leave a Reply

Comments are closed.