Why I hate Powerpoint

This one was not too bad, though: http://www.slideshare.net/dougkessler/crap-the-content-marketing-deluge. You’re not being falsely modest or are you, Mr. Kessler?

Thanks Frank — but we didn’t make that one in Powerpoint — we used InDesign.

I wouldn’t even try to craft anything using the dreaded ‘Formatting Palette’. In fact, I do as little as possible in the program but I am forced into it a few times a week. My colleagues can tell by the high-pitched squeals and streams of expletives.

Yes, PowerPoint isn’t great for the average user. Neither is InDesign or indeed any software that we expect to get decent design outcomes from. You think the average business person can do cool stuff in Photoshop? No. Others can, because they learned how.

I take your point Joby. But I don’t even want to do cool stuff – I just want to determine what my slides look like instead of arguing with the software on virtually every slide!

Yes, I should probably invest some time getting better at it. But I resent needing a course in such a fundamental tool. Word seems to behave most of the time. Excel does amazing things for power users and is still usable for mortals. But Powerpoint seems to delight in frustrating even my most mundane needs.

I’m glad people like you are out there helping people like me master it – but it would be far better if we didn’t need help. This should be so simple by now.

Thanks for your comments.

I agree 100% on this one.
I’m trying to be PPT free since months, but sometimes I need to use it for corporate presentations. But I hate it.

The thing that bothers me the most is PPT is incredibly slow and heavy after 23 years.

Anyway, I start thinking that the best presentation is the one without any support. The presentation is the speaker, and this way of thinking is helping the crowd and the speaker to really interact, and this is the best part that is TOO OFTEN missed nowadays.

Anyway, in my mac I don’t have any presentation software. My last presentation was done using google drive (have to say I really dig neat presentation if I have to show something).

cheers.

Great point, Alessio: probably 80-90% of presentations that use Powerpoint don’t need any slides at all (or maybe just one or two charts).

But when you need it, you need it (and it sucks).

Yes, yes, yes.

Add to that the completely random nature of video playing (will it? won’t it? on this pc? on that pc? If I email it to a colleague to check over and she changes 1 word on 1 slide and sends it back to me? And, oh, blow me down with a Dyson AirBlade, it can’t even play a WMV), PowerPoint is the work of the devil.

Horrible, horrible software which encourages people to think that they’re Cool and Cutting Edge because they can make a graphic spin and dissolve into another one.
And, ohh, what fun – a sliding transition! That’s how to win a pitch, right?

Eugh.

I think I’m seeing a “30 Most Hilarious PowerPoint Struggles Ever” deck.
Sort of like this (http://www.buzzfeed.com/jessicamisener/the-30-most-hilarious-autocorrect-struggles-ever), but for powerpoint.

It’s like the early morning commuter train, but worse. We all hate using it but we seemingly have no other viable, consistent choice. What makes it worse, is that you can easily spend more time on Powerpoint than a commuter train, and it doesn’t try to be your choice of vehicle to share what may have been a lot of your valuable brain power. At least they’ve managed to get toilets on trains. Not being able to change your default font is the equivalent of still having to plan a pre-train toilet routine to avoid needing to go whilst on said vehicle. Who’d of thought – a commuter train can be something in a game of top trumps…….POWERPOINT!

Ryan: I love that idea. Mostly my .ppt fails just lead to ugliness (it’s not auto-correcting my words yet).

Jamie — I do think a lot of my fury is that I feel trapped.
I tried an open source suite for about a day but incompatibilities with client software made me give it up.

Doing Powerpoint on a commuter train would be the ultimate bad day.

Doug, why don’t you just use images rather than text? That gets around all your font issues. Plus, if you use a lot of text in PowerPoint, people are reading your slides when they should be listening to you talk. And, of course, “a picture is worth a thousand words”.

Hi Bill — it’s true, image-based presentations are usually much better. But I use Powerpoint for documents too: internal presentations where I also want of leave a record of the discussion.

I do use the all-image approach when I can though.

I’m jumping in late here, but I’ve been wrestling with the very same limitations inherent to Powerpoint. In my search for a superior 21st century alternative, I have narrowed it down to three possible candidates:

1. Prezi (https://prezi.com/)
2. Haiku Deck (https://www.haikudeck.com/)
3. Slideshare (http://www.slideshare.net/)

All three alternatives boasted prettier visuals, with Prezi also offering that unique ‘spatial context’ functionality that enables a presentation to show the spatial relationship between slides instead of simply moving through them in a linear fashion.

For my own purposes, Haiku and Slideshare were out of contention immediately as a key requirement in my selection process was the ability to create, store and exhibit the presentation offline.

Prezi offers a desktop version of its software and it is possible to keep your presentations offline, however Prezi will only let you use its own selection of fonts out of the box, so you can’t apply your own corporate branding (it is possible to rewrite the software to facilitate this, but you must pay for custom coding to create a bepoke version of the software, branded for your company).

Therefore, although it isn’t pretty or very powerful, Powerpoint ultimately wins (for now) by simply lending itself more effectively to the core business requirements of its users.

Plus, we already have it built into Office (as you mentioned), so it’s the only option that doesn’t require the purchase of additional software.

Completely agree, powerpoint has got to be one of the worst & most infuriating programs I have the misfortune of using. The fact that one can’t crop multiple pictures at once is what annoys me most, spending 2 hours cropping each picture individually as opposed to cropping them all identically is an absolute fucking joke.. Nothing I wish for more is if i could just delete the pile of shit sitting there on my desktop, but no.. it is the only presentation software used at my work and so it seems I just have to deal with it until the office manage to install keynote on the macs.

I’m PowerPoint-neutral but would love to try a cooler alternative that’s ubiquitous and allows everyone else to open and edit the file without a hitch no matter whether they’re on a Mac or PC. Oh there’s none? Okay.

I’ve read about these guys (duarte.com) who seem to really squeeze the juice out of PowerPoint though.

I agree, this software is garbage and it isn’t due to a lack of intelligence on the users part or the length of time a person has used this software.

I’m an engineering student, so please forgive my grammar.

To send an image of a document online, I want to use PP compress feature to remove the cropped data. I feel I am on par, I understand that was something I should do, and that PP could do.

The problem is that after reading half a dozen microsoft and private help pages. I can’t fucking figure out how to crop a small rectangle out of the picture.

I am only given preset shapes or to crop overall size. Microsoft Paint can do this. I just want to handle the entire operation in one software so that I am more certain the cropped data can’t be recovered.

I mean recovered by modest efforts of an novist snoop; not the NSA.

a hispanic computer service has been harrasing me for months . they wont take no as an answer. their calls on my landline phone are transmitted by POWER POINT. POWER POINT always says i cant talk to them.i receive their message via star 69. i was astounded to find this is a WINDOWS program?? Thanks A LOT!!!

I’d consider myself relatively skilled at powerpoint.
To me, it’s pretty intuitive to use.

You can change all the default things such as fonts in the slidemaster. You can put things exactly where you want them by going to the formatting menu.

I agree that it is, however, bad software.
Not because I think it’s difficult to use, but because it has its limitations.

For example, I can’t trigger animations at the end of a slide or format links like I want to. They actually added a menu and a guide to formatting links, but it doesn’t work.

I really do wish presentation software wasn’t such a dead market, with no real competitors to PowerPoint, though.

I’m glad I’m not the only one who hates using Powerpoint. I do art history presentations (HEAVY) on the visuals. I used to be able to use Artstor’s OIV, but they’ve ceased supporting it.
OIV had a palette to keep potential images in — no messing with separate file folders or having to make a slide for EVERY image. It was easy to insert extra images, AND I could click and drag from a palette image to a textbox and it would ask me what part of the Artstor caption to insert!

My anger with powerpoint brought me here and I’m glad I have support in the way I’m feeling because I HATE IT SO MUCH and I still cannot escape it.

Oh my godness, this post is such a fun and let me feel better. Right now I have to create different Powerpoint templates for a customer and I’m constantly annoyed. Then I googled “I hate powerpoint” and found this. Thank you for your words! :’-D

As an instrutor, I never had to use Powerpoint until moving to China and teaching some not very fluent in English high schoolers. Even at the best high school I taught at in China never encouraged Powerpoint. I lectured, the students pretended to listen. Now, I’m forced to use Powerpoint, but never received any instructions as to the preferred style of slides, or preferred font. Not only that, but I spend HOURS putting these presentations together, and the students demand that I send them. They demand that so they can sit in class and play video games or watch NBA videos. Mind you, this is the college level. Obviously, I’m not teaching at the Chinese version of Harvard. But even in grad school, which was not that long ago, I don’t remember a whole lot of Powerpoint. We were expected to listen to the lecture, and contribute by commenting or asking questions.