Here’s great news – I had just wondered about it earlier today, and now there’s actually a quick way to get some feedback to Microsoft about the Office 2007 beta. This blog post explains it nicely, and here’s the download in case the MSDN blogs are inaccessible (which they sometimes seem to be).

Can’t say if this is really specific to PowerPoint, but I just noticed that PowerPoint 2007 regularly uses the clipboard internally.

I’ve been using ClipMate for a few years now, which is a really fantastic clipboard monitor/archiver tool with a lot of functionality around clipboard use. ClipMate also has a setting to produce a sound when the content of the clipboard changes, and that’s what made me notice that clipboard content was regularly changed while I was creating and editing slides in PowerPoint. Specifically, when the new live preview functions kicked in while I was hovering the mouse cursor over the Ribbon, this happened all the time.

Looking at ClipMate’s Explorer window, I can only see that PowerPoint is apparently pushing empty image data to the clipboard. It does this several times with a block of same size, then the size changes at some point, to be repeated several times again. No idea why this happens, but I don’t like it…

Why is this a bad idea? Well, simply put, the clipboard is not a tool to be used for application-internal purposes. The clipboard content should be defined by the user of a Windows computer, not by the applications running on that computer. Any user who’s not using a clipboard monitor will lose clipboard content when an application just writes its own stuff over the existing content, and this in turn will give the impression of the computer behaving irrationally, as the user is not aware that a change to the clipboard content has occurred at all. So far, I had only found a few applications doing this, usually of the kind where I might expect the programmer not to know better – finding this kind of bad behaviour in a Microsoft Office application is a completely different thing, and I certainly hope they’ll fix this.

Which brings me to a different and really unrelated topic: Where’s the “send feedback” menu entry? They have all this fancy automatic crash reporting stuff, but I have to find an online forum somewhere myself before I can send such reports in? (Actually I have no idea whether that’s what they want me to do. Will have to go look for it when (if) I have the time.)

I posted before about a few inconsistencies in the Office 2007 UI, and now I found that there’s not even a common UI document model underneath the various applications. I did some tests with PowerPoint, Word and Excel – what I want is really simple: I want to be able to open more than one document at once, and I want each document to appear in its own window. Of course each of those windows should have its own button in the task bar (it wouldn’t cross my mind to mention this specifically, but as I found out, this is apparently not a normal thing to expect). I have three screens attached to my computer, so I want to be able to view several documents of the same type next to each other, and I want to use Alt-Tab to switch between main windows, because my task bar is seldom where I need it and always so full that I can’t easily find the right button anyway.

So here’s how the three applications behaved in my test.

Word

There’s an option called “Show all windows in the Taskbar” (Advanced/Display) in the options dialog. This effectively switches between an old-style MDI interface and a new-style interface that behaves exactly like I would expect (see above). Good! The drawback about MDI is that there’s no Windows menu anywhere to be seen, so the handling of a number of MDI windows is probably more difficult then it used to be.

Excel

Excel has a similar option (same name, but this time it in the Personalize/Top options for working with Excel section) as Word, but the result is different. After analyzing it for a while, I would say that Excel simply always works as an MDI container. When the option to show all windows in the task bar is switched on, there are two differences:

1. The task bar shows one button for each open Excel workbook, although there’s always just one Excel main window.
2. The close button for maximized MDI child windows vanishes. I can still close them if they are not maximized, though… I guess the reason for the disappearance of the close button is that I’m supposed to use the main window close button. In this mode, the main windows doesn’t close the main window, but instead the active child window. Ridiculous.

    

In my quest to make Excel behave the way I want it to, I tried to run multiple instances of the application, and I was surprised to see that this actually works! No matter what the button option is set to, it’s possible to run Excel more than once to get multiple main windows on screen.

PowerPoint

PowerPoint has, once again, a similar option, and this time it can be found in the same place as in Word. But the behaviour of the application itself is closer to what Excel does: it works as an MDI container always, and the option switches the number of buttons in the task bar. In contrast to Excel though, when the option is On, there are no MDI child window buttons at all. So the only way to switch between one child window and another is to use the Windows task bar.

In contrast to Excel, it turned out to be impossible to run multiple instances of PowerPoint. Every time a new instance is run, a new document is created in the existing instance instead.

Summary

So we have at least three different UI document models in these three applications. All three of the applications can be used as MDI applications, but in absence of proper in-application window handling (no Windows menu!), this is not very useful. Switching off the MDI mode has three different results – multiple main windows in Word, no real effect at all in Excel and MDI without child window buttons in PowerPoint. The workaround of running multiple app instances is available in Excel, in PowerPoint the only way to see multiple presentations on screen at the same time is to use the broken MDI mode. Way to go, Microsoft!