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PowerPoint 2011: Editing charts in Excel is a maddening process

Sunday, October 28th, 2012

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, […]

PowerPoint 2011: Selecting and replacing text is a nightmare

Wednesday, February 8th, 2012

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 […]

PowerPoint 2011: Paragraph selection bug

Sunday, February 13th, 2011

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 […]

PowerPoint 2011: Still no easy way to space paragraphs

Thursday, November 4th, 2010

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: […]

PowerPoint 2011: Yet more visual glitches

Thursday, November 4th, 2010

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 […]

PowerPoint and Keynote: Wrapping text around objects

Thursday, September 30th, 2010

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 […]

PowerPoint 2008: Problem when displaying same presentation in two windows

Wednesday, February 24th, 2010

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 […]

PowerPoint 2008: Incorrect word selection behaviour

Monday, November 17th, 2008

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 […]

PowerPoint 2008: Wrong behaviour when extending paragraph selection

Tuesday, November 11th, 2008

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 […]

PowerPoint 2008: When left is right

Sunday, November 9th, 2008

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 […]

PowerPoint 2008: Stupid bullet behaviour

Saturday, November 8th, 2008

I hate PowerPoint. I only use it because I have no choice, when my clients ask me to translate PowerPoint presentations. I have tried using Keynote, in the same way that I use Pages for translating most of my clients’ Word documents. But unfortunately, the compatibility levels are not good enough. There are just too […]

PowerPoint 2008: Now compatible with Spell Catcher X, except in tables

Monday, February 11th, 2008

It is now actually possible to use Spell Catcher with PowerPoint—to a point.

PowerPoint 2008: Attaches ‘Save’ dialog sheet to wrong window

Monday, February 11th, 2008

Dialog sheet attached to the wrong window? Only in Microsoftland.

PowerPoint 2008: Fails to update insertion point properly

Monday, February 11th, 2008

Cursor stays in italics even when the application is inserting roman characters.

PowerPoint 2008: Sloppy selection highlighting

Monday, February 11th, 2008

Only a visual glitch, but probably symptomatic of the underlying problems.