[IxDA Discuss] MS Office app prototyping bake-off?

[Sherman, Paul]

Hello IxDA, 

My team of interaction designers is interested in determining the most
efficient and high-fidelity prototyping tool among three alternatives:
Visio, Access, and Excel. 

They design interactions for a Windows-only, desktop-based financial
management software product.

The team's highest priority requirement for the prototyping tool: it has to
support dropping an image onto a canvas and overlaying workable controls
onto the image.

They would also like to be able to set tab order. It would be nice to be
able to set defaults, for example a selected radio button in a radio button
group. They'd also like to be able to set a blinking cursor in the first
field when that field is a text box. These last two are nice-to-haves.

They are not so concerned with linking screens in a workflow, but that would
be also be n-t-h. I suspect this functionality will become more important to
them in the future.

One last thing: they are not so concerned about their prototypes displaying
inside an Access or Excel frame, although of course they would prefer that
their prototypes were not obviously contained with another application. 

I'd love to hear what this community has to say about this. I'm also open to
other tool suggestions. 

Paul Sherman