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PowerPoint 2008: Can’t even render Arial font properly

Monday, February 11th, 2008

Rendering Arial 10 pt properly is apparently too much to ask.

PowerPoint 2008: Disappearing cursor when using cursor keys in text box

Monday, February 11th, 2008

Yet another illustration of the incompetence of the MacBU. Either they never use their own software, or they don’t care.

PowerPoint 2004 (and Excel 2004): Won’t select words properly next to an em dash

Wednesday, September 27th, 2006

Selecting words next to an em dash selects the entire string (word before, em dash, and word after).

PowerPoint 2004: White text becomes invisible when selected

Friday, March 24th, 2006

One of the most disgraceful things that Microsoft has ever done. And that’s saying something.

PowerPoint 2004: A bad UI that breaks all records

Monday, March 7th, 2005

Each time I am forced to use Microsoft PowerPoint (thankfully it’s not that often), I am reminded of how awful its user interface actually is. It is really quite astounding. Yesterday I had to translate a couple of PowerPoint presentations and, of course, the client wanted the translation to be done in PowerPoint. I have […]

PowerPoint 2004: Very poor interface for paragraph spacing

Wednesday, November 17th, 2004

This is a typical example of how atrocious PowerPoint’s interface is, and the very real impact that the poor interface has on office workers in their daily work. I am referring here to the tools provided by the PowerPoint interface to create space between paragraphs of text and, more specifically, between list items in a […]

PowerPoint 2004: Centered text that doesn’t look centered

Thursday, October 7th, 2004

Here’s the footer part of a master slide design in PowerPoint 2004: As you can see, the text is perfectly centered inside the footer text frame. After all, all I did was type some text and click on the “Align Center” button in the Formatting Palette. Here is, however, what the exact same footer looks […]

PowerPoint 2004: Keyboard shortcuts for navigating/selecting text

Thursday, October 7th, 2004

It’s maddening. As I reported recently, in Office 2004, Microsoft changed the default keyboard shortcuts for navigating/selecting text in Word 2004. For example, in order to select text word by word, instead of using command-shift-Left/Right, you must now use option-shift-Left/Right, which is consistent with text selection in other Mac OS X applications. Why is it, […]

PowerPoint 2004: Replace command doesn’t treat character case the same way as in Word 2004

Thursday, October 7th, 2004

In Word 2004, when you use the “Replace” command to replace, say, “section” with “part“, if you do not check the “Match case” option, Word will replace things as followed: section will be replaced with part Section will be replaced with Part SECTION will be replaced with PART etc. It’s handy, because it effectively replaces […]

PowerPoint 2004: Problems with notes in ‘Normal’ view

Wednesday, October 6th, 2004

PowerPoint suffers from so many fundamental issues that it’s simply scandalous that this software is allowed to exist. It’s doubly scandalous that Microsoft apparently makes no effort to fix such issues from one version to the next. Some of the most obvious problems, are with the various view modes offered by PowerPoint. When you first […]

PowerPoint 2004: Doesn’t follow basic UI guideline for checkboxes

Monday, October 4th, 2004

Last week, I wrote an item about the recent Jakob Nielsen article on checkboxes and radio buttons in user interfaces. At the time, I thought that the failure to comply with the basic UI guideline — which says that radio buttons are for mutually exclusive options while checkboxes are for lists of options where the […]

PowerPoint X: Scandalously poor text editing interface

Tuesday, January 13th, 2004

I don’t know if it’s the same for PowerPoint XP or other Windows versions of the product, but the text editing tools in PowerPoint X are abominably poor. I have already covered certain problems before. Here are a couple of new ones that are driving me nuts today. The first one is, I suspect, a […]

Killed by Microsoft PowerPoint

Tuesday, September 30th, 2003

When people talk about software quality control and the horrible amount of bugs and flaws inflicted upon hapless software users world-wide by careless software companies such as Microsoft, one of the key points is that these companies can get away with selling such buggy software because, unlike driving a car, for example, using computer software […]

PowerPoint X: Pathetic

Monday, February 24th, 2003

Speaking of poor application support… Thank God I don’t often have to use Microsoft PowerPoint. But sometimes I do. I get a contract to do a project involving translating a PowerPoint presentation into French. I have no choice but to edit the presentation text in PowerPoint. PowerPoint 2001 for the Mac was bad enough. But […]

PowerPoint X: Somebody pinch me

Sunday, February 23rd, 2003

Alright, this is the last note about PowerPoint X. But I have to mention this… The default view in PowerPoint X is this three-pane view with the presentation outline on the left, the slide view in the top-right pane, and the slide notes in the bottom-right pane. It is impossible to change the font or […]