Paper Reading # 24

Comments
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Reference
Outline Wizard: Presentation Composition and Search
Lawrence Bergman, Jie Lu, Ravi Konuru, Julie MacNaught, Danny Yeh
IUI'10, February 7-10, 2010, Hong Kong, China


Summary
This paper talks about creating presentations from existing presentations from common program such as Microsoft PowerPoint. There are no searching tools that can return single slides displaying the content a user is searching for. The authors propose a system called Outline Wizard which is an outline-based composition and search program. The main goal of Outline Wizard is to search from hierarchical structures to facilitate creating presentations and adding slides from existing presentation. Another important aspect of their system to achieve search that can find results that are relevant to a specific topic of information. Currently when you search for a specific keyword the user will find a single slide but other slides with relevant information on that keyword will not be retrieved in the search. Trying to find relevant information can be tedious and time consuming, so Outline Wizard stressed the importance of adding the capability of constructing presentation with a hierarchical structure.

Discussion
This paper introduces a very cool idea, I consider this paper one of those that can actually beneficial to users. I am not too familiar with PowerPoint's searching capabilities but I would think that idea would have been introduced earlier. Another thing that I noticed is that in the screen shots, they seem to have an older version of PowerPoint which would probably explain these proposed search capabilities were not present in PowerPoint yet.