Gripe 2: Office 2003 Lost Opportunities (PowerPoint & XML)

My last post talked about my first gripe, lack of full XML roundtripping support in Excel. Take a look at the comment Stephane Rodriguez made about my first gripe. Thanks Stephane, it was an interesting take. Now onto Gripe #2.

Gripe 2: Lack of any XML Support in PowerPoint
PowerPoint 2003 does not add any new XML support. That?s right, you can?t save a PowerPoint document as XML, you can?t programmatically retrieve it as XML, and there is no schema mapping. Now I?m stretching this a bit, you can get at the document properties as XML if you saved the document as HTML, but that has minimal value.

For some this may seem trivial, as the average users rarely use PowerPoint. However, in many industries, Finance being a primary example, PowerPoint is used daily. The finance industry uses PowerPoint excessively for making pitches to customers. A popular application built around PowerPoint is the PitchBook. A PitchBook is a customized application that produces sales presentations based on proprietary data and algorithms for a salesperson. A PitchBook allows a salesperson to assembly complex customer presentations in just hours as opposed to days.

For many years developers have wanted to generate presentations on the server (and nonwindows servers). XML is the perfect solution for this. XML & PowerPoint would create a whole new breed of PitchBook and other autogenerated presentation applications.

Data harvesting is another key user scenario for XML & PowerPoint. Organizations that rely heavily on PowerPoint have thousands of PowerPoint presentations on servers. These presentations are related to sales, project status, proposals, briefings, and etc.

These presentations often contain key information that does not exist elsewhere. I once had a boss who almost never used anything other than PowerPoint to make proposals to customers. Everything useful he produced (and that we had to deliver on) lived-in PowerPoint.

Microsoft, you missed an opportunity on this one. Anyone else agree with me?