My last two posts talked about how hard it is to accurately reproduce advanced features of PowerPoint in web conferencing products. Over the years I have tried to help vendors and users evaluate their conferencing software and spot potential problem areas with a "PowerPoint Torture Test" that throws difficult content at the web conferencing products.
I just updated the file to include the new PowerPoint 2016 "Morph Transition" effect, along with a few other complex transitions and full-screen animations that should give screen sharing products a hard time reproducing all the smooth motions for participants.
You can download the PowerPoint file from this link:
Please add comments to this post if you find a web conferencing product that displays everything perfectly, or you can mention areas where they run into difficulties. If you are reading this in an offline reader, you can comment on the original post at:
I want to emphasize that this file is intended as a "stress test" and should be almost impossible for any conferencing product to transmit to participants on all device types or network connections without degradation. The point of the exercise is to isolate the worst case scenarios so that vendors can devote additional development efforts to them and so presenters know what things are best to avoid. If the product you use doesn't achieve a perfect score, it doesn't mean you should cancel your subscription!
You should also be aware that unless your local copy of PowerPoint 2016 includes a subscription to Office 365, you won't see the Morph Transitions when you run the slideshow locally. I tried to make the morphs particularly complex. The elements change size, orientation, color, and edge effects (such as glow) with each transition. That's a lot of interpolation and a lot of pixel updates to manage. There's a reason I call this a Torture Test.
