Powerpoint problems

April 21, 2008 11:28 AM

We made a powerpoint presentation on a Mac and sent it to a number of people both in the US and abroad. Most people are reporting difficulties with the formatting - text spilling over onto pictures, etc. What gives?

The presentation looked perfect to us and I was under the impression it would be compatible with other versions of Powerpoint - both Mac and PC. (We used version 11.2.) Why is this happening? And more importantly, what can we do to remedy the situation?

posted by anonymous78 to Computers & Internet (8 answers total)

It could be that the other users don't have the same fonts installed, and the substituted font is of a different size and therefore doesn't fit the same way as the font you used. One way to solve this is to export the presentation to pdf, but this would lose any animations (or videos, etc.) you might have in the presentation.
posted by tractorfeed at 11:32 AM on April 21, 2008

What type of font did you use? If you used one that the other people don't have then on their computers it would switch to their computers default font. Which would screw up the formating depending on the typefaces size and spacing.
posted by lilkeith07 at 11:35 AM on April 21, 2008

You may want to check the fonts that you used. I've had this problem before, with the Mac to PC transition. For reasons best known to our microsoft overlords, you can't use most Mac fonts on a PC and vice versa. Stick to the short list of compatible ones:
Arial, Arial Black, Century Gothic, Comic Sans MS, Impact, Tahoma, Times New Roman, or Verdana. In my experience, Powerpoint is less cross-platform friendly than the rest of the MS products.
posted by gingerbeer at 11:36 AM on April 21, 2008

Recently noticed a similar problem when playing back presentations created on a widescreen monitor on a not so widescreen display. Is no work so pretty.
posted by Iteki at 11:54 AM on April 21, 2008

The Office 2004 is only compatible with other versions of Office in the sense that other versions of Office can read and display the data as originally intended. However, 2004 does not format documents, whether PowerPoint, Excel or Word, in a way that they will be "picture perfect" in other versions of Office. They use the same document format, but not the same rendering engine.

It's a situation not unlike the way Firefox and Internet Explorer render web pages; they both may well be compatible with the same versions of HTML, but they both use different rendering engines, so a page they both can display ends up looking slightly different.

It's a giant pain. If you really need to maintain document formatting integrity, PDF is the way to go.
posted by I EAT TAPAS at 12:02 PM on April 21, 2008

It has got to be the font.

The only other thing that I have seen cause problems goes in the other direction: PC to Mac. There is an "autoformat" thingy that will change the size of the fonts as you type. If you leave this thing on, it can cause horrendous problems when moving platforms. Turning it off and manually setting the font size fixes the problem. You shouldn't have to resort to a PDF.
posted by SciGuy at 12:39 PM on April 21, 2008

Be aware that even if you use the "same" font on both Mac and PC there will be plenty of variation. Aside from the inevitable font variation between platforms just think about it; the Mac standard screen is 72 DPI the PC standard screen is 96DPI. Also Macs do kerning a heck of a lot better/differently than PCs.
posted by Gungho at 1:10 PM on April 21, 2008

Yeah, this is a typical PC/Mac PowerPoint issue. There's no good way to deal with it. The bad way I usually deal with it is to make sure the font size (or text box/autoshape size) is big enough to have some extra breathing room. Then, if you can check it on one Mac and once PC and it looks good, generally it will look good on all Macs and all PCs.

...Generally.
posted by SampleSize at 11:37 PM on April 21, 2008