Viziware: Conversation with Staf Musto

Staf Musto is a programmer, UI designer, technical trainer and most recently, the lead developer of Navipane at Viziware. Staf also gives a series of lectures at the University of Toronto, where he studied from. When Staf isn't infront of a 1,024,000 tiny dots (also sometimes called pixels), he enjoys reading, writing and biking.

Geetesh: Tell us more about yourself, Viziware, and Navipane for PowerPoint.

Staf: Viziware creates add-ins for Microsoft Office. Add-ins are small programs that integrate with Microsoft Office and run when Office runs. There a lot of companies that create multifarious add-ins. Many of these add-ins are frankly not that useful. What's different about Viziware is that we believe in creating quality add-ins that are intuitive and very time-saving. Let me talk about our flagship add-in, Navipane.

Navipane comes in three flavors: for Word, for Excel and for PowerPoint. Navipane fits right into a "pane" for quick access, hence the name "Navipane". I'll just focus on the PowerPoint version now. Navipane for PowerPoint allows you to easily navigate your presentations in a very intuitive way. You can navigate and interact with a multitude of key objects in your presentations--objects such as comments, hyperlinks, tables, shapes, animations to name a few. Additionally, you can create an Excel report of the properties of these key objects. Navipane allows you to organize frequently used presentations as Favorites and Groups. This can save tremendous time when you need re-visit presentations. Another innovative feature is the History Tracker, which records exactly when a presentation was opened or saved. We are also going to add a Slides Organizer feature that is similar to the Sheets Organizer feature in Navipane for Excel.

We recently released another product for PowerPoint called Ribbon Clicker. Ribbon Clicker automatically clicks the Office 2007 Ribbon for you so you don't have to. You just hover over the tab and Ribbon Clicker does the rest.

Geetesh: What is the audience profile for Navipane: is it business users, developers, or both. Do explain with some case studies.

Staf: Navipane is mainly intended for users that need to manage and analyze their Office files. It is extremely useful to both business users and developers. If I really had to choose a single category, I would say business users. Here's an example of the usefulness of Navipane: Joe creates presentations for many clients. He uses tables very frequently in the presentations he makes. He has over 100 presentations which need table data to be manually and carefully edited. Joe uses Navipane to quickly go through all available tables in a 100 presentations and makes a 5-hour job into a 30-minute task. He goes one step further and organizes his clients' presentations as Favorites and Groups.

Navipane for PowerPoint is also very useful for those who need to analyze their presentations for consistency purposes. Examples of analyzing a presentation include: checking the number of shapes in, say, slide 5, making sure no animation is present in the presentation, making sure all hyperlinks point to the right addresses, finding all OLE objects.

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