Mac Forum / Applications / PowerPoint / May 2008

I'm a heavy Powerpoint user, who recently switched from Windows to Mac.  At
first, I continued using Powerpoint 2003, under Parallels.  However, this
was a
somewhat cumbersome solution, so I thought I would try Powerpoint 2008 for the
Mac.

I am sorry to report that the experience has been terrible.  Enumerated below
are some of the problems I have encountered.  Some of them are obviously bugs.
Others are evidently poor design decisions, but so poor that they effectively
cripple the product for its intended use (at least for me).  I assume other
people have experienced these same problems.  I am therefore looking for
suggestions, bugfixes, workarounds - anything that helps.
Thanks in advance.

(I have a Mac Pro with Mac OS 10.5 (Leopard), and I am running version 12.1.0
of Office for the Mac, i.e. including Service Pack 1.)

    1.  The controls for inserted movies are very buggy.  First, checking
    on "Loop until stopped" causes the movie to loop continuously, but it
    pauses at the end of roughly every second loop for a second or two,
    then jumps back to the beginning and begins playing again.  This
    happens even on small (in X and Y), short (in time) movies, regardless
    of filetype.  Before I installed Service Pack 1, the movie would
    actually pause in the *middle* of the movie, then jump back to the
    beginning; now it pauses at the end of the movie.  So its behavior has
    improved slightly with SP1, but it's still not right.

    2.  To circumvent this bug, I tried manually clicking on the movie
    after it has played, in order to replay it.  This works once, playing
    the movie a second time, but clicking a third time does nothing.  One
    must click three times to replay the movie a third time.  After that
    replaying, clicking once will immediately replay the movie a fourth
    time, and so on in this strange rhythm.  Bugs 1 and 2 may be related.

    3.  To circumvent this second bug, I tried checking "Rewind after
    playing".  This checkbox works correctly on some movies, but not
    others.  In the latter case, it does nothing, as if the checkbox
    weren't checked.

    4.  I also tried clicking on the "Show movie controller".  This brings
    up a slider-based movie controller, but what is its purpose?  It
    disappears as soon as you unselect the object, and it never appears
    during the presentation.  Thus, you can't use it to control the
    presentation, nor to select which frame the movie starts or ends on.

    5.  One more bug about inserted movies - if an image is inserted into a
    slide in front of a movie (designed for example to appear after I've
    played the movie, then clicked the mouse), then the movie plays
    jerkily.  This behavior regardless of the filetype of the movie.  This
    doesn't happen in Window Powerpoint 2003.

Since being able to control a movie is mission-critical for me, I gave up on
controlling inserted movies, and decided instead to link to my movie files,
which I would then play in an external player.  However, in Powerpoint 2008
this is equally problemmatic.

    6.  First, action settings don't allow you to link to a file, with the
    notion that the file would be opened by the default application for
    that kind of file; you get an error message "Can't locate or start
    <filename>".  This method of linking to files works in Windows
    Powerpoint 2003.

    7.  To avoid this bug, I tried hyperlinking to the movie file.
    However, in Powerpoint 2008, if you hyperlink to one of your own files,
    you get two pop-up warnings in succession every time you click on the
    file, even during your presentation.  There appears to be no way to
    suppress these pop-ups.  Since Powerpoint is supposed to be a public
    presentation tool, this effectively makes hyperlinks to files useless.

In desparation, I now pre-launch my movies (before starting my presentation),
and switch tasks to the movie player in the middle of the presentation.  In
the year 2008, this is a pretty lame solution to playing movies during talks.

8.  There appears to be no way to change the color of equations entered using
the Microsoft Equation Editor; black is the only option.  Black doesn't work
if
your slides are black.  In Powerpoint 2003, you could "Recolor object" to
change this color.  Of course I can circumvent this problem by changing the
slide's color scheme, but since I have dozens of talks that contain equations,
this would be a major undertaking.

9.  The progress bar for the autosave function is very annoying.  I like
having my work saved in the background, but I don't like having the progress
bar pop up across my work every 10 minutes.  If it's really a background
function, then just do it quietly.

10.  Powerpoint changes the "Date Modified" of files, even if you only look at
them, without making any changes.  This makes it hard to keep track of when
you
have modified a presentation.  This bug affects only .ppt files, not .pptx
files.  But I have hundreds of such files, and I keep them sorted in the
Finder
using "Date Modified".  Yes, I could start renaming my presentations to
include
the date every time I modify one, but this is an error-prone workaround.

This bug is so severe that it's almost a show-stopper for me.  It may drive me
to either revert to Powerpoint 2003 or 2007 under Parallels or VMWare Fusion,
or switch to Apple's Keynote package.

-Marc Levoy
Palo Alto, CA