PowerPoint's not acting the way the instructions say it should

Teachers and trainers: Are your students complaining that PowerPoint's not working the same as the instructions?

You've chosen the very best instructional materials for your students. It comes from a reputable, reliable publisher. It's been written by acknowledged subject matter experts, fact-checked, tech-edited and reviewed before it was published.

So what's gone wrong when your students can't follow seemingly simple instructions, like "Start a new presentation based on the Frame theme"?

Don't assume the student has failed. Assume that MS has failed the student.

It used to be simpler

Not that long ago, before Microsoft released a new version of Office, book and courseware authors received pre-release copies of the software to write about. There'd always be a few changes between these early "beta" versions and the final released version, but tech editors caught these before the instructional materials, books and magazine articles went to press.

We can personally attest to this; several of the people who had a hand in writing this article have beta tested nearly every version of Office and have written books, magazine and web articles about them, including publications from Microsoft itself. If you're interested, we introduce ourselves below.

But now ...

Microsoft has embraced the notion of rapid and continuous updates to Office.

In some respects, this is a very good thing. It means that they can release monthly updates that fix problems, if needed.

The downside: the updates don't get tested nearly as thoroughly as they used to be.

An update that fixes one thing may break something else.
A feature may be changed and behave differently.
A feature may be silently removed altogether.

As a teacher, understand that the software your students are using now may not be the same as the software described in the instructional materials. There will be times when they simply won't be able to carry out an assignment because of changes that Microsoft has made to PowerPoint.

Here are a few of the things your students might encounter:

Disappearing Themes and Templates

In theory, Microsoft sometimes removes themes and templates but don't replace them with updated ones.

Result: The themes and templates simply disappear from your students' computers.

Suggestion: If an assignment currently requires students to base a new presentation on a specific theme, change it to something that tests the same skill set but that doesn't depend on specific themes. For example, you could require students to base a new presentation on a theme other than the default blank theme and to indicate on the title slide which theme they've chosen.

At the very least, check with a few of the students to verify that their computers do have the themes/templates you expect them to use.

Clip art, sounds, movies -- Gone!

Without warning the users, Microsoft has apparently decided to stop supplying clip art, videos and sounds. Instead of inserting clips supplied with the software, we're now redirected to a Bing search or in some cases, shown an empty, blank dialog box. Or the options provided may vary from one version to another.

Result: Your students won't be able to carry out assignments that rely on the Microsoft content you have on your computer.

Bonus Teaching Moment: This is a great opportunity to teach your students to be aware of and to respect intellectual property rights and restrictions.

In any case, it's a good idea to test the current state of the software yourself. After making sure that it's fully updated, create a new assignment based on the way the software's working at the moment. And understand that it may yet change again.

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