Pictures and Graphs in MS Word trouble

You guys realize designing anything in Word, Powerpoint or Excel is printing suicide? You might as well roll the dice and ask "lady luck" to be kind to you this time. :)

Print shops hate Microsoft programs because when their docs print they provide almost no data as to what's actually printing.

Next time you should just use InDesign or Quark. (Can you tell what side of the fence I am on?! He he.)

:)
 
Natobasso - for ourselves this is a good idea, but in the mean time it is simply too much fun to go to meetings or presentations and see a whole bunch of PC based people struggle with screwed up and incompatible files (just between different versions of Office for PC)! Whenever this happens, and a long winded technical discussion on how to use Office begins, I often lean over to whoever I am sitting next too and say something like, "Technology will revolutionize business."
 
karavite

He he, good point. I don't ever try to say one type of computer is better than another, but when I hear people are placing images in word I cringe and wince and shudder… :)

Do you use Suitcase for you fonts? I find it conflicts with Word's "optimizing fonts" function and makes Word take ages to load…just talking shop here. I assume you are a graphic artist by trade?
 
Hey Natabasso! Sorry, I'm not a graphic artist but an application usability/interaction designer (who knows what to call myself these days!). I'm not a big publishing person in any way and I generally use the same old tried and true fonts the rest of the world uses - nothing fancy at all. Of course, when I need to, I then gladly work with people like you who are experts in graphics and graphic design. We all need to work together! Even developers! ;)

And all those meetings I talked about and their Office based delays make me think of that old Apple commercial - remember the one where a guy is giving a presentation and the system freezes and all kinds of people start yelling PC based advice and suggestions? That one was brilliant and all too true to this day. I mean 99% of my meetings are about implementing technology to solve some problem and we can't even run a presentation for the meeting with the most widely available presentation technology. Does the irony escape anyone else but us here? :)

Sorry for getting off the Word topic, but much of the same applies to Word as well as ppt!
 
karavite

I agree with you completely. Many problems at an old, and very small, company I used to work for had to do with people trying to tweak our database to save time and money, only to screw everything up in the future when we needed to format the data in a different way. They'd just say let's use field "X" like "Y" and then they'd wonder when they tried to compile all the X data that they'd end up with all the Y data. Silly people!

Of course only the sales guys at that job ever used powerpoint; I would just supply them with graphics (and laugh my head off!) :)

I never saw that ad, but it rings true in my mind. You speak the truth! I think it IS very important for us IT and designers to share information. I like bridging the gap between our two worlds because really, they are very similar. They are symbiotic.
 
Natobasso said:
I apologize as I keep screwing up your actual job title! :)
Click to expand...

Hey no problem, especially when it changes every other month! Usability can't seem to decide on a name and/or everyone chooses sublte differences in explaining what is essentially the same thing - user experience design, interaction design, human computer interaction, user centered design...
 
Hi,

I have had the same problem with powerpoint. However, it is unique to certain macs. My personal mac can see the images but, when I view these images on another person'e mac they can't see them. I noticed when looking at them from a PC that some of the file types were *.wmf and *.emf. When I converted them to any other format (jpg,gif,pnf,etc) I could see them fine. However, the image quality was degredated severely when seen on a mac and not PC.

You guys might want to try to save the images in other formats. Does anyone know where I can find the 'plugin' for *.wmf and *.emf compatibility in Office?
I tried re-installing office and adding EVERYTHING but, that didn't seem to work.

Anyone know the source of this degradation in image quality when moving from PC to MAC? Or a fix.

I wish someone could just create a PowerPoint-like app in Flash. My experience has shown that Flash is highly platform independent. A all you need to view is a web browser with a plugin. 99.9999% of desktop computers already have flash installed in it.

Thanks,
 
Lets just pray they never port Visio over to the Mac! :) On a PC the other day I used Acrobat to print a Visio file as a pdf and though I was using nothing but Times and Arial fonts, all the text in the pdf showed up as gibberish. So much for upgrading to the latest version of Visio - the old version never did this. It is unbelievable to me that all these kind of problems (everything on this thread) exist in "productivity software" in 2004. See what happens when competition is taken out of the picture via monopolistic practices?
 
Well, at least we got kind a kind of clue why things go wrong when it comes to pictures. But what about formulae, greek characters and graphs.

I expect that there is at least a workaround for the greek characters since this problem seems to be OS X related (other standard font for greek characters) because I didn't have any trouble with Office 2001 ;-) .
 
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