Feb 14 2009
Redmond, We Have a Problem: Freeform Drawing in PowerPoint 2007
Once you start drawing freeform objects in PowerPoint 2007, you quickly realize it behaves very differently than it did in PowerPoint 2003. I don’t understand why Microsoft decided to mess with something that wasn’t broken. I’ve identified three separate issues related to freeform drawing that were introduced in PowerPoint 2007. For PowerPoint ninjas, these issues are like bamboo shoots under our finger nails. Well, maybe more like hangnails — but they are really annoying!
Three key freeform drawing problems in PowerPoint 2007
Freeform drawing in PowerPoint 2007 has three key problems.
First, when you’re trying to draw straight lines, the lines no longer snap to an invisible horizontal or vertical guide when you hold down the Shift key. This can be frustrating as your shapes can end up being slightly askew as you now have to guess/eyeball if the lines are truly horizontal or vertical. Unfortunately, guides can’t even help with this new problem.
Second, as you draw in PowerPoint 2007, occasionally one of your lines will become curved when you’re trying to create polygons. You can go back and edit it, but it may throw you off as you’re drawing as your object unexpectedly contorts out of shape. This random curve problem never happened in PowerPoint 2003.
Third, you need to change your overall freeform drawing approach in PowerPoint 2007. In PowerPoint 2003, you would draw a rough outline of the shape and then move the points to where you want them. In PowerPoint 2007, for some reason after you’ve drawn an object, you are no longer able to move the points to exactly where you need them (I’m talking about the minor adjustments you do in high zoom mode).
Even though you’ve disabled all of the snap options (to grid or other objects), there is still a slight snapping action back to the original position which makes it difficult to make minor adjustments as you can’t re-position the points and lines exactly where you want them.
In PowerPoint 2003, you were able to move the edit points anywhere. As a result of this change (bug?) in PowerPoint 2007, when you’re freeform drawing you have to get your drawing as precise as possible when you’re first drawing the object because you have less control once it is drawn. This is the opposite approach from what I was used to in PowerPoint 2003. I’ve been so frustrated a few times that I’ve actually gone back to PowerPoint 2003 to freeform draw certain objects that were just too difficult in PowerPoint 2007.
Tip: Sometimes the following trick can help you to overcome this annoying “snap-to-original-position” behavior.
Follow these three steps to make a minor adjustment to a line or point.
Rather than trying to make a small adjustment, make a dramatic adjustment to reset the original position of the point or line. Then when you try to achieve the desired position, the original position is out of the way and doesn’t interfere with your edits.
Related posts:
February 15th, 2009 at 12:43 pm
Been there…. This is especially annoying when moving boxes/people around in an organization diagram….
March 6th, 2009 at 3:09 am
I’m starting to hate powerpoint2007 because of the above problem. Is there a fix for this? I can’t find any mention of this on the MS site. I’m very sure that anybody who used edit points on 2003 will be seriously effected by the new behaviour.
March 6th, 2009 at 7:07 am
I haven’t been able to find any hotfixes or even admission from Microsoft that this feature changed. I don’t understand why they needed to mess with something that wasn’t broken. It’s extremely frustrating for me.
The only fix I’ve run into is having both PPT 2003 and PPT 2007 on my laptop. Some freeform drawing needs have required me to go back to PPT 2003 simpy because I just could not achieve what I wanted in PPT 2007 (without significant hair-pulling).
April 16th, 2009 at 12:35 pm
Great article, This has been driving me nuts. I am going to submit via the microsoft complaint form, if that helps at all!
April 27th, 2009 at 11:27 am
I spent an hour this morning trying to create a very irregular shape in PowerPoint 2007, something that I need to do in my job every day. After an hour of this nonsense I went back to another laptop I happen to have loaded with PP 2003, and completed the task in less than five minutes.
I recognize that everthing new has a “learning curve” but I work with graphical, interpretive software every day and have never found anything so unintuitive in my life. I have nothing but disdain for people who think that greater complexity equals “advancement”. Keep it simple, Stupid.
April 27th, 2009 at 7:12 pm
100% agree with you. You know you messed up in software development when you force customers to revert to an earlier version of your software to complete a task.
April 28th, 2009 at 12:50 pm
Thanks goodness I’m not the only one. I assumed this would be fixed in the SP2 that just came out. Guess what, its not. Arghghgh. How can we lean on Redmond to get with the program - seems incredible that I can’t simply draw a freaking horizontal line easily in freeform with their $’00 package. Seriously, what gives and how do we make it change?
April 28th, 2009 at 1:09 pm
One ninja move you CAN do - turns out the Word drawing engine still supports the “snap to vertical or horizontal”. Its pretty horrible, but you can create a doc there then paste over. Just a thought.
May 11th, 2009 at 7:06 am
Another freeform drawing problem is that the preview colour while drawing is black and does not automatically contrast with the background (it worked fine in 2003). This is completely annoying if you draw over a lot of X-ray images, as I do. Partial fix is to temporarily change to black and white, but this doesn’t help when drawing over dark pictures. I have ended up changing the contrast of a picture to do the drawing and the change back after drawing.
July 7th, 2009 at 7:11 am
I hate Powerpoint 2007 for this. I used to be able to draw neat diagrams in earlier versions, but now it is nearly impossible to draw a horizontal or vertical lines and connect objects in the way you want.
I think Microsoft has messed this up on purpose to force us into buying Visio. But I used to be able to do what I wanted using Powerpoint, and I do not want another bloated program just to do an occasional diagram.
July 21st, 2009 at 8:59 pm
I too find this really annoying!!! The other thing is you can’t simply pop out the autoshapes toolbox and place it anywhere you like (as you could in 2003)… I’ve always found Powerpoint to be a nifty drawing tool in the past, why did they have to ruin it
September 3rd, 2009 at 2:04 pm
Kudos for this elegant explanation. I’ve been delaying “upgrading” to 07 for this and other reasons. I deplore the lame, or if intentional, criminal degradation of PPT in this version. It seems to have the same design aesthetic behind it as the Vista update, and as John points out, it’s not an “advancement.” The slowness of the program as it does all its irrelevant fancy dancing is driving me bats, then add glitches like this and it’s hard to not hate MSFT, since they should know better.
September 5th, 2009 at 11:20 pm
A tip to software developers — don’t break what isn’t broken when you introduce new features. Maybe MSFT can “fix” this in PPT 2010. I hope they also learn from this recent mistake, and not break anything else in PPT — or I’ll quickly become the Keynote Ninja.
October 21st, 2009 at 8:22 am
Also, when zoomed in at 400% to get great acuracy, any moving of a point jumps you to the background centered position, and you have to go and find where you were working before the jump. Absolutely impossible to get anything done with edit points in PPT 2007.
December 8th, 2009 at 5:02 pm
OK, you Ninja’s, here’s a work-around. Select the point (and hold), then hold down the Alt key and you will have fine control of position. Also when you are just moving objects with the mouse, this works. If you move objects with the arrow keys, hold down Ctrl for fine control. (Go figure.)
Beyond that, I agree with the obtuseness of drawing controls in PPT 2007.
December 12th, 2009 at 8:33 am
I am baffled. Having wiped my PC to get rid of a virus and being forced to move to Office 2007, I was very worried by the above comments as I enjoy playing with PowerPoint graphics. So I experimented and found “Edit Points” works exactly as before. The occasional problems with getting curved or straight segments, or with visually getting a line vertical or horizontal, are no better or worse than before. The only difference I can see so far is that there is now the great bonus of being able to convert a stock Autoshape to an editable freeform, rather than having to create something like a circle with a flattened base, for example, from scratch. So far my only mysterious problem is that 2007 won’t run 2003 animated slides smoothly, which is a pain.
December 21st, 2009 at 10:40 pm
Graeme,
Your comment about not having any serious problems after installing Office 2007 peaked my interest. When I wrote this post back in February, it was definitely a problem. Between then and now, Microsoft released Service Pack 2 for Office 2007 on 4/24/09. I installed SP2 over the weekend, and it appears to have cleared up the drawing problems as far as I can tell (except for the shift key positioning which is still “broken” - thanks big Al). Therefore, if you have PPT 2007 installed and are having problems, try installing SP2. Thanks for the insight.
December 23rd, 2009 at 7:33 am
I got SP2 installed when XP was reloaded after a virus infection. I don’t know if that fixed the basic drawing problems, but it hasn’t helped with the problem of animations running slowly and hesitantly. I’ve found various people on other forums with the same problem and the infuriating thing is that if you are in Custom Animation and press “Play” (i.e. “preview) the animation and sound both run perfectly, but switch to Slide Show and PPT 2007 can’t cope - or at least it takes 10-15 seconds to get a grip on things, by which time the action and the music (which runs normally from the start) are out of synch.
Someone suggested that PPT 2007 has been quietly “degraded” to encourage people to buy Visio. But Microsoft are a kind, caring and honest bunch of people and I can’t believe they would ever do that. Would they?
March 19th, 2010 at 1:25 pm
Ninja, are you sure SP2 fixed the first problem you described above? I have SP2 and don’t seem to have problems 2 or 3, but I cannot get the shift key to provide the positioning options like it did in 2003. So I still cannot use the freeform tool to create polygons with perfectly horizontal or vertical line segments.
March 20th, 2010 at 8:19 am
Big Al, I stand corrected. The shift key option does not work with SP2 either. I think problems 2 and 3 were bugs in PPT 2007, which Microsoft fixed. It looks as though they either decided to take away that functionality (why?!?) or missed that feature when they redesigned the editing options so it was probably an oversight.