Betalogue

Editing PowerPoint slides with PowerPoint 2011 is absolutely maddening. As a professional translator, I sometimes have no choice but to work directly in PowerPoint, and each time I end up exceeding my frustration quota because of PowerPoint 2011’s sheer crappiness. I’ve already written about PowerPoint flaws in the past. Each time I use the application, [...]

I have already had the opportunity to report on multiple bugs in PowerPoint for Mac OS X involving text selection over the years. Just do a search for “PowerPoint” in this blog to get an idea. Here’s another one to add to the list. Let’s say you have a typical PowerPoint slide that looks like this: And [...]

For the first time in my life, I have to design a presentation to be shown to an audience as part of a conference, using an LCD projector. Given my long and painful experience of having to translate PowerPoint presentations for various clients using the various flavours of Microsoft PowerPoint that I unfortunately have been [...]

Here’s yet another example of the pathetic level of attention to detail in Microsoft products for Mac OS X. (This level is close to zero.) Say you have a list of items formatted as bullets: I don’t need to tell you how common this type of thing is in PowerPoint presentations. As expected, a single click on [...]

If, like me, you are a word processor user who likes to compose “smart” documents and use the proper text formatting options instead of ugly workarounds like double returns and multiple tabs (we are admittedly a small minority, but we do exist), I am sure that you will be delighted to hear that, in the [...]

Here’s a pretty good example of Microsoft’s chronic inability to fix real world problems with real, workable solutions. I cannot count the number of times I have to work on PowerPoint presentations that contain slides with bullet lists where, in order to create vertical space between each bullet, the author has used a double return: [...]

Here’s the situation. I am in a text box and I have selected a paragraph that I need to replace with some other text that I have copied in the Clipboard from another application: I then press command-V to paste my text: Then I see that, of course, PowerPoint is not smart enough to paste [...]

As regular Betalogue readers know, I am a very reluctant PowerPoint user. I generally think that Microsoft’s products for Mac OS X are complete and utter crap, but PowerPoint really takes the cake, so to speak. If other Microsoft software titles for the Mac are bad, PowerPoint is positively atrocious. (I would extend my comments [...]

For a long time, Office applications have had a feature where you can view the same document in two different windows at the same time, which enables you to view and edit two different sections of the same document or view the same document in two different view modes at the same time. It’s a [...]

Do you ever get the impression that Microsoft Word 2008 is a flaky, unreliable Mac OS X application? Do you ever feel that the reason for this impression is something seemingly minor yet obvious that affects your interaction with the application at all times? Well, if so, I invite you to try the following experiment: [...]

Some day, developers at Apple and Microsoft (and probably in a few other places) are going to have to wake up to the fact that, in the real world, table cells are not used just for numbers or other types of numerical data, but also as containers for blocks of text of varying length. And [...]

You can always count on Microsoft to screw up even the simplest, most basic things. In PowerPoint 2008, they have managed to break one of the most basic mechanism for extending text selection. Say you have a line of text and you select one of the words in the line by double-clicking on it, which [...]

Since my post yesterday on the lousy Adobe CS4 installer generated a fairly substantial amount of feedback (thanks in no small part to a link on Daring Fireball), including a post on Adobe product manager John Nack’s own blog, but also a fair amount of private e-mails, I would like to clarify a few things. [...]

I am forced to spend a lot of time in PowerPoint these days, and I am having so much fun. (Can you tell?) Here’s further evidence (if needed) that Microsoft’s engineers could not design a proper text editor to save their own lives. When it comes to text editing, some things are supposed to be [...]

It is truly extraordinary. I sincerely believe that Microsoft are the only software company on the face of this earth that is capable of producing software that cannot tell the difference between left and right. No wonder they blamed PowerPoint for the last space shuttle disaster. Here’s the situation. I have a block of text [...]