Why I hate PowerPoint

See, Powerpoint makes it really easy to set up a consistent look/theme for your presentation. There are standard slide layouts, themes, a color scheme, master slides, and so on. But, once you have your design all set up and you’re inputting content, it’s actually more difficult to keep your design/theme intact than it is to set it up in the first place.

If you paste text into a standard, auto-text box taken directly from a default layout and/or your slide master, PowerPoint assumes, “why would you want this text to match your presentation theme? You most certainly want that text to carry its font, size, style, and alignment from wherever you copied it from, don’t you? of course you do.” I JUST found the workaround for that this week and I’ve been working with PowerPoint for almost a decade now.

All this causes problems for designers (or anyone) who sets up a slide template with a “theme” or “brand” for use in multiple presentations. In my opinion, consistency is usually what you want in presentations – they’re usually for corporate, marketing, or educational purposes and you want each slide to look similar to the others in the same presentation, and you want the presentation you’re giving this week to match the one you gave last week. So, I design a template and send it along to my client and they very quickly lose all the value I gave them by designing a standard, consistent look for the presentation. They paste in their content, rearrange, add/delete stuff, and there goes the template.

PowerPoint’s Microsoft Office suite-mate, Word, has a system for setting up styles for your documents. If something needs to be brought into line, just select it and apply the appropriate style. (The whole thing is not simple, has a stiff learning curve. But at least the capability is there.) Another Office standard, Excel, has “paste special” where you can choose to keep the source formatting if desired, otherwise new content will adopt the formatting of the Excel spreadsheet.

So it’s not like Microsoft doesn’t know about this stuff. They just forgot to think through the user goals of a PowerPoint user. Joe Shmoe, VP of Marketing, is in a hurry. He needs to pull together a PPT, ASAP. Oh, sorry, Joe. You’re going to have to fiddle around for hours if you want your slides to look nice. He doesn’t have hours, so another crappy PowerPoint presentation goes public.

One caveat: I don’t have the most recent version. Maybe they’ve cleared up all the usability issues in the current release. But I kind of doubt it.