A Disappointment with PPTPlex

I did a presentation this afternoon on some of the basic functions of WCF. I had put a slide deck together using a new Microsoft Office add-in called PPTPlex. You can see demos of what this add-in does in the provided link, but basically is allows for a much more dynamic experience of going through the slides in a slide deck. As compared to the typical linear flow, PPTPlex allows you to easily jump from one slide to another with a couple of clicks up and down the slide hierarchy.

I was pretty excited to be able to put this technology to work in the real world - right up to the time when I started the slide show.

Most of the time when I do presentations, I use a split screen. That is to say that what is displayed to the audience is not the same as what I see on the laptop in front of me. The new Presentation Mode in PowerPoint 2007 helps me a great deal with working that way. I was expecting that, when PPTPlex was run as a slide show, I would have expected the same appearance, that being that the slide show (such as it is) would be displayed on the secondary monitor.

I was disappointed.

Now it may be that there is a setting that I missed that would have allowed this to happen. I will admit that I was standing in front of the class when I tried this, so the time allocated for exploration was limited. But I expected it to just work and it didn't. Sigh.

Now I haven't yet got back to a place where I can do some detailed investigation, but as soon as I do I will see if I missed something. I hope so, but I doubt it. More details as they become available.