The PowerPoint for Mac (v.X and 2004)
Outline Pane Text Clipping Bug
Update: I just noticed that all these same
symptoms also apply to the notes pane, which I rarely use. So I guess this is really the "Outline
and Notes Panes Text Clipping Bug"...
Use the following links to skip to the bug
description or straight to the screenshots.
Please also consider filling out an online
feedback form to Microsoft, so they know this problem exists and it's not
one user's imagination. This is the only official channel which is guaranteed to
at least be read by actual employees.
Introduction
I created this page to help raise awareness about a bug in PowerPoint for Mac
which exists in version v.X and is still present in version 2004. The fact that
it survived a major release doesn't speak very highly of Microsoft's product
verification process, but hopefully they can make up for it by fixing it now. I
would very much like to purchase the Office 2004 suite, but unless this bug is
fixed, I will not spend a dime on the product. Since I don't own the product yet, I
also do not have any support options with Microsoft. This is a bit of a dilemma,
and creating public demand
is the only way I can think of to get it fixed.
I am a graduate student in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, and
have done a fairly substantial amount of programming myself. So I'll try to
explain the bug as best I understand it for everyone, but also include some
detailed guesses on what's going on for developers. I'm not an
actual GUI application developer, though, so please excuse any poor assumptions,
terminology, etc.
Desired Behavior
The outline pane is the leftmost part of the PowerPoint window which
lists all your slides and the text they contain. If you run any version of
PowerPoint on a Windows PC, you'll notice that as you type text into your
presentation (wherever you type it, either in the outline view or on the slide
itself), it wraps in the outline pane, meaning any word which would
extend past the edge of the pane is continued on the next line. As you change
the size of the outline pane, the text will rewrap accordingly so that you can
see everything you typed.
Note that there is a minimum width at which the text will wrap -- if you make
the outline pane too small, the text will flow beyond the right edge of the
pane. However, once this happens, the horizontal scrollbar (located at the
bottom of the pane) will become active and let you scroll the view so that you
can see all your text. This is good design practice, because it doesn't do any
good to wrap the text so much that words are being spread all over the place. If
the user makes the pane very small, they're probably not using it at the moment
anyway.
On PowerPoint for Mac (either version v.X or 2004, as I've seen), things
aren't so smooth. First, the minimum wrapping width which is described
above is far too wide on the Mac. If you open up a new presentation, just
start resizing the outline pane to a bunch of different widths. You will notice
that once you make the outline pane small enough, the horizontal scrollbar will
appear at the bottom of the pane and become active. The point at which the
scrollbar appears (which I am calling the minimum wrapping point) is quite large
-- about 375 pixels. You can fit an awful lot of text in that amount of space at
the default zoom level of 33%. I also noticed that this is proportional to the
zoom level. If you zoom in to 66%, the minimum wrapping point looks like about
770 pixels, which is roughly twice as large.
Both of these features are surely by design, although I strongly disagree
with the size of the minimum wrapping point. I feel this should be much smaller.
I ran into this limit very quickly on a 17" iMac, which is a fairly large
screen. I'd hate to see how cramped screen area is on a 12" PowerBook.
The absolutely critical bug is that the horizontal scrollbar in the
outline pane only moves the view by a handful of pixels and almost all the text
is completely inaccessible. In the computer and electronics world, the term
usually used when something reaches a limit and is lost or otherwise cut off is
clipping. To test this out, type a long line of text into a presentation
and make sure you are in Normal or Outline mode so that the outline pane is
visible. Now shrink the outline pane beyond the point where the horizontal
scrollbar at the bottom becomes visible and your line of text is longer than the
width of the pane. Drag the scrollbar right and left and see what happens... not
much! The view only moves by a small amount, and you can never reach the right
edge of your line. This is a major bug as far as I'm concerned, since you are
forced to keep your window very large and/or your text very small to be able to
see it all.
Here are a few screenshots of the bug, for reference or in case you don't
feel like reading all that junk above:
| This is a snapshot of a regular window with the default size and
zoom chosen by PowerPoint for a new presentation. You can see the text
is wrapped correctly and none of the line is missing. You'll also notice
how tiny the text is (almost hard to read) -- this is exactly why I
prefer more zoom and found this bug in the first place. |
 |
| This snapshot shows the exact same window, but with the text zoomed
in to 50%. Notice the horizontal scrollbar is now active, and the right
side of the text is hidden. |
 |
| This snapshot clearly shows the bug. The horizontal scrollbar
is all the way to the right, but most of the line of text is missing.
There is no way to see or edit it from the outline pane. |
 |
I don't know offhand how to create an animated image, or else I would create
one out of the last two images to really demonstrate how not even the scrollbar
can reach the whole line of text. To see it on your own, open each of the last
two images at the same time (if each image opens in a separate window, align the
windows so that they are in the exact same position, i.e. perfectly
overlapping), and switch between the two snapshots. Viola, a homemade animation
of the text clipping bug.
Conclusion
OK, so this was very long-winded and detailed. But I hope you agree that this
is a BUG and not just a "feature". Microsoft: please fix this bug and I promise
I will buy the product. For the next 20 days or so, I have the Office 2004 Test
Drive, but pretty soon I'll just have to go back to Windows to use Office,
because the buggy v.X from school is getting old.
| 
