I hate it when my boss walks into my cubicle unannounced. I have to psyche myself up for any human contact.

"Loved your report on the relationship between employee moral and suicide," she said with a smile. "Would you mind presenting it to the board of directors at their annual meeting at the Xanadu Resort 10:00 tomorrow morning?"

"10:00 tomorrow morning? But that’s when my other report is due."

"Office Efficiency and Employee Stress. Don’t worry about it. You can turn it in tonight. Oh, and make sure that your presentation contains slides."

Well, a request is a request and an order is an order, and there really isn’t any difference between the two. So I launched Polite2Point, the up-until-now unused presentations program that had been sitting on my hard drive since IS had upgraded my software suite and deleted all of my spreadsheet macros.

The program started on a friendly note, with a small dialog box titled "Tip of the Iceberg." Here Polite2Point recommended that "In order to add snappy, concise, and informative information to your presentations, use the keys marked Q through M on your keyboard to enter what professional designers call text." I thanked the program and went on.

Next the program asked me if I wanted the Polite2Point New Presentation Necromancer to create my presentation for me. Seemed better than doing it myself.

After asking for my name, company, and credit history, the Necromancer wanted to know what kind of presentation I was going to give. Was I selling a product? Justifying poor company earnings? Proposing marriage? I clicked "Reporting on the Relationship Between Employee Moral and Management Suicide" and moved on.

After selecting a color scheme (Tahitian Hangover) and a visual style (Terry Gilliam), I clicked the Finish button and in a few seconds my presentation was finished. Well, almost finished. It seemed a bit soft on content, most of which was on the level of "Add something here for historical perspective" and "Make a lame joke that will offend absolutely no one."

Putting Text in Context
The obvious place to go for content was my original report, written in my word processor, ForLetterWord. But as ForLetterWord and Polite2Point were part of the same office suite, there was no clear way to move text between them. After twenty minutes of examining menus, reading help files, and bugging co-workers, I finally figured out that I could click the Insert menu and select File, Other, Something Else, Non-Standard, Obscure File Formats, Not a Picture, ForLetterWord, and bring in my document--provided I had first saved the report as an .RTF file. The result was the entire, 20-page report dumped onto a single slide that wouldn’t fit on an Imax screen.

After I’d deleted that slide and copied and pasted my text a paragraph at a time into assorted slides in Polite2Point’s template, it was time to prepare my charts. I had already created them in an Excess spreadsheet, and amazingly enough, they were easy to import. With a couple of mouse clicks, the first graph slid smoothly into its intended slide--with everything else from the accompanying worksheet appearing around it. This called for cropping the image, a task that involved clicking the Crop icon (a field of rye), then dragging the lower-right corner of the image while holding down Shift, Ctrl, T, 8, Caps Lock, and my speakers' volume control. I also had to deal with the chart’s background color, which Polite2Point interpreted as a charming puce plaid interwoven with a retching hospital green.

Mass Transitions
Three hours after first loading Polite2Point, I had my presentation. I was about to click the Slideshow button when I noticed an option I hadn’t seen before: Transitions. Maybe this was my escape to a whole new life.

An hour later, I had my presentation. Now my Introduction slide spun into my Mission Statement slide, which dissolved into my Goal slide, which sank away for my Objective slide. My favorite transition, however, came with the Summary slide, which beat the Recommendation slide into a lettery pulp, scared the Available Options slide off of the screen, and set itself on fire before leaping into a vat of HTML code.

After viewing my presentation with pride for the eighteenth time, I suddenly realized my dilemma. The presentation was on my computer, but I was supposed to give it at the Xanadu. Luckily, Polite2Point has a feature, Making It Flop, which compresses your presentation and a slideshow program onto floppies.

The next morning, I proudly turned up at the Xanadu with my 23 floppies. The directors were in another room eating croissants when the CEO’s personal assistant ushered me into the auditorium and pointed to the overhead projector.

It seemed like a simple device, with no controls except an on/off switch and a focusing knob. But it had me stumped. " Where do I put the floppy?"

© Copyright 1998 by Lincoln Spector

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