PowerPoint 2008 For Mac: Keynote With A Pretty Face?

Tuesday, January 22, 2008 | What's New | Read or Post a Comment

PowerPoint Last week I took the plunge and gave Mac360 readers a first look at Microsoft Office 2008 for Mac, specifically Word and Excel.

Let’s take a look at PowerPoint, which I use instead of Apple’s Keynote. What? Blasphemous, you say? Sorry, I’m a big fan of Microsoft Office for Mac. It’s that whole compatibility with the business world thing, I guess.

And, more sorrow, I use PowerPoint for presentations more than I use iWork’s lovely Keynote. It’s not that there’s.... (excerpted).

6 Reader Comments

iggy pence said:

Make sure you have the same fonts as they PowerPoint slides you’re given to edit. That’s a must, whether using Mac or Windows.

debaney said:

Help! I’m using PowerPoint 2008 for Mac for editing the slides of others. But nearly every time I go in to edit something, other things fall off the slide—even in areas of the slide where I didn’t work!!
I often end up with asterisks where numbers or words used to be.

Has anyone else had this problem, and how did you fix it?

Thanks for any advice. (I’m going to lose my job if this keeps up.)

Doris said:

There are so many problems with PowerPoint 2008 and compatibility with the rest of the world that it’s painful to do presentations anymore.

Among a few of them. PowerPoint 2008 puts a space before every line when you work with bullets that come from the PC version or even the Mac version 2004.

I just created tables in PowerPoint 2008 that became pictures when someone opened them in PowerPoint on the PC. She couldn’t make changes.

You can’t copy and paste objects between Office 2004 and Office 2008.

The list goes on and on.

Hans said:

Janis, you missed my point. Bare in mind these presentations are comprehensive and requires many pages of various reports, using both tables and charts, so I don’t want to keep on manually inputting data every time it changes (who has the time or the manpower?)! I want to link my various financial databases to my Presentation shell; I do this in real MS Office and have been for years, but now am forced to do it the Mac way (manual, slow, page by page, inefficient, etc. . .), which is time consuming and more prone to error. As data changes each month, or even throughout the month-end process, I simply want to drop the refreshed data dump into Excel to update my database (s) and reports, and have PowerPoint update when I either open it, or edit/links/update. This is such a fundamental function to be missing, that why it is not available for Macs is a real mystery.

janis montgomery said:

If you’re using PPT, then why are you grumbling about Keynote. Take your spreadsheet data and enter it into the data area in Keynote’s charts. Make a change in the data, and the change occurs in the graphs, too. Cool, huh?

Hans said:

Help, I’m using PPoint for Mac!

In Microsoft PPoint you can link your Excel data to the presentation. Update your data, and it automatically updates in PPoint. In Keynote or the OfficeMac Excel and PPoint, you CANNOT do this for some reason overlooked by people who designfor schools and artists rather than for businesses. All presentations are completely manual and not business user friendly. If numbers change, you have to copy/cut and re-paste yet again or input manually again!

I wish Apple would get with the program. Many of us in the business world would love competition and better products as a result. However looks are one thing, functionality is another, which is why Microsoft Office is still the tool of choice. . .

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