Ah, why is it that the PowerPoint team still doesn’t get it? Don’t they realize that users need to manage more than one PPT document open at once? No, don’t tell me that you can open additional documents in a single instance—that’s not going to work. That’s because we want to be able to manage each PPT file separately on its own monitor. Most serious developers (or PPT users) are blessed with multiple monitors but even if both of these are running the same resolution (not necessarily the rule) the mechanism to stretch the window to cover both monitors is very clunky at best and just does not make us efficient.
Every other Office application permits you to run multiple instances so one can put one document or spreadsheet on one monitor and another on another monitor.
Folks, it’s been years since people first started asking for this basic functionality. Yes, I know the PPT team lives in its own little world fighting the Windows metaphor, but it needs to grow up and join the 21st Century and the rest of the Microsoft Office team.
I installed the PowerPoint 2007 Viewer (and SP1) but while this runs in a Window (only full-screen), it does not support copy/paste to import content from the second PPT. I also tried to setup a runas to launch PowerPoint as a different user but this failed with a strange IO error—bizarre.
