Why I Hate Powerpoint, Volume 527

Do you want to know, in a nutshell, the latest thing that bothers me about PowerPoint? I hate how they define the layout of your master slides. Sure you can modify title and text slides, but if you want to change the default layout of graphic slides, you just can’t do it. I spent far too much time yesterday and this morning trying to convince PowerPoint that what I really wanted was a layout with a title at the top of the slide with a picture centered below it and a caption at the bottom. That was fairly easy. If you then hit the ‘layout’ button for ‘picture with title and text’ it shuffles things around so that you’ve got a two column layout with the caption as a bulleted list next to the photo. This is wrong.

The other thing that torques me off is how it won’t export slide builds as multiple slides. Basically, if you’ve got a single slide that pops up as a series of bullet points, you should be able to export that slide as a series of files, each one showing the next step in the build process. It can’t be that hard. Aldus Persuasion could do it back in 1994. Apple’s Keynote version 2 does it today. You can even get a shareware program that’ll automatically export everything to an iPod Photo and present from there fer cryin’ out loud…