The SlideMagic office add in for Microsoft PowerPoint got rejected for a second time. There are still some technical issues with getting it to work in Office 2013 (I cannot install this old software anymore to test things), but there were a 2 other reasons given:

• “your offer demonstrates insufficient interaction with our service”. While the Javascript API for other Office solutions (Excel, Outlook, Sharepoint) is very extensive, the only thing you can do in PowerPoint is add an image, add a text box, and add an entirely new presentation in a separate file or browser window. (The latter is what I am using to serve my template, Microsoft does not give me the option to insert slides into an existing presentation.

• “Our product team have reviewed your offer alongside our validation team and believe that should your offer contain more compelling templates, it would be possible to allow the offer to be published without interaction with the open PowerPoint presentation” I think what Microsoft means is that if my slide layouts were more interesting, users would not have a problem that (the more interesting) layouts would open in a completely separate presentation.

I will continue to try to fix the technical issues where I can, but it is hard to change the fundamental characteristic of SlideMagic: offer really simple templates that save you time to make presentations…

Anyway, the workflow of simply downloading slides from the web site is actually not that bad. Also, Many users actually use the current version of the PowerPoint plugin, the only difference is that it does not appear in the official Microsoft store. I had a quick look at the Google Slides API, which is far more flexible than Microsoft’s one. I think Microsoft leaves a big opportunity untouched by de-prioritising PowerPoint when it comes to the Office Javascript API, hopefully it will change its mind.

Photo by Steve Johnson on Unsplash