14 DAY TRIAL // One project from Office Labs continues to evolve and to attract downloads, even though Microsoft announced that it had officially stopped development over a year ago. Despite the fact that the Redmond company has halted building efforts for pptPlex, a new version of the plug-in is now available for download, tailored to the latest iteration of Office PowerPoint and Windows 7. Essentially, following the introduction of an update earlier this week, pptPlex now supports Office PowerPoint 2010, as well as the multi-touch capabilities of Windows 7.
“We noticed that pptPlex wasn't working with PowerPoint 2010, so we took some time to get it working with the latest version of PowerPoint. Today’s update fixes a few compatibility bugs with PowerPoint 2010, but it also includes an important user experience change with regard to sections,” a member of the Microsoft Office Labs revealed.
For those unfamiliar with pptPlex, the PowerPoint plug-in is designed to leverage the Plex technology in order to enhance presentations. In this regard, users will be able not only to seamlessly zoom in and out of slide sections, but also to jump from one slide to another even if the items are not placed sequentially within the presentation.
“In PowerPoint 2007, there was no concept of sections, thus pptPlex added the concept. In PowerPoint 2010, there is a concept of sections, thus pptPlex takes advantage of that concept. What this means is that when you’re using pptPlex in PowerPoint 2010, to create, remove, or rename a section, you’ll need to use the PowerPoint user experience, not the pptPlex experience. There will be no ‘Insert New Section’ button in the pptPlex ribbon, and the section divider slides won’t be necessary,” the Microsoft Office Labs representative stated.
While the team behind the project claims that it was only playing when it released the latest update, the plug-in has amassed over 190,000 downloads since it was introduced in 2008. And with the latest refresh, users running PowerPoint 2007 or 2010 on top of Windows 7 will be able to take advantage of full multi-touch support.
“If you are running Windows 7 on a computer that supports multi-touch, pptPlex will support several gestures when presenting, including: pinch to zoom, swipe to go to next/previous slide; tap to zoom; two-fingered tap to zoom out,” the Microsoft Office Labs member added.
UPDATE: Corrected Microsoft Office Labs label.
pptPlex for Office PowerPoint 2007 and Office PowerPoint 2010 is available for download here.