I continue studying the user interfaces of Microsoft—the leading corporation in developing office products. Last time we drew your attention to the alignment of numeric data in Outlook. Today we’ll be talking about saving files in PowerPoint.
One typical operation is saving each slide of a presentation as image files. This is convenient when you need to insert slides into a website or a video file. When this operation is performed, it’s logical to ask the user whether he wants to save all the slides or just one, for example the current one. But when the presentation consists of just one slide, that question makes no sense. Nevertheless, PowerPoint asks it:
You might think there’s a common algorithm in there for zero, one, or N slides. But if I try to save an empty presentation as graphics, I don’t even have that option:
So the designer did, after all, think about some edge cases. But, as we can see, not all of them.
After reading Alan Cooper’s book “The Inmates Are Running the Asylum”, I’m starting to notice things like this more and more often.