Stupid, Stupid PowerPoint

I mentioned in a previous post that Microsoft PowerPoint had improved, but was still painful to use. This reminded me of one of its most painful (and elementary) user interface errors in some previous (I think!) version.

A few years ago, I started up PowerPoint on a new installation of Office and it greeted me with a big box in the middle of the screen that offered three choices. I don't remember exactly what they were, but they were something like 'Open an existing PowerPoint Presentation', 'Create a New PowerPoint Presentation', 'Run the Tutorial'. (I admit that such screens drive me mad, but accept that they have a valuable role for novice users who don't really know what to do with an empty document or a bare menu bar. So as long as there's a reasonably obvious way to turn the dialogue off forever more . . .) The weird thing was, I tried clicking on 'Create a New Powerpoint Presentation' (repeatedly), and nothing happened.

This is incredibly confusing and off-putting behaviour. I don't know how long it took me to take my eyes off the prominent box in the middle of the screen asking me what I wanted to do, but it felt like a long time. As some readers will already know, when I did, I eventually noticed Clippy at the bottom left asking whether I would like to 'Begin using PowerPoint now'.

Words fail me at this point, though curiously they didn't at the time!