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I thought I was in the Tropics over the last few days. First it was the heat wave, now we get (almost) monsoon style rain (admittedly only for a little while). Since my office has air conditioning, I suppose this is an incentive to stay there and work!

Speaking of work, I was making a presentation for a site visit. Now, their computers use PowerPoint 2000 whereas we have XP here. As many of you may know, PowerPoint is notorious as far as backward compatibility is concerned. However, I belong to the minority who do not use a single animation feature (not even the sequential display of bullet points - I just have everything on the screen at once), so I thought I could not go wrong. How wrong was that...

Luckily I have access to PowerPoint 2000, so I was able to check before I made the journey. I have several shapes with a gradient fill that has been flipped. On XP, the gradient fill would flip with the shape as expected, but good old 2000 would leave the gradient as it is. This is a relatively easy fix, so I'm not going to complain too much here.

However, the shock came when PowerPoint 2000 tries to display my images, which are in PNG format. When I prepared those images, I had a white border around them so that I know where to crop. Since my slides have white background, nobody will notice the white borders on my images - except PowerPoint 2000 of course! It has decided to put a hideous shadow under the white border, so every slide has some random grey/brown lines lying across (I have multiple, overlapping images on some slides).

Instead of having the white borders on my images, I replaced them with a white background fill, but 2000 still doesn't like it. I'm not sure what is happening exactly, but I have a feeling that PowerPoint 2000 will put a shadow over any PNG images on the slide.

Hmm... this post is getting rather long, let's continue the story next time...

Labels: rant, work