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frozenstar

macrumors regular
Original poster
Jan 6, 2003
210
0
My mother is very skilled in PowerPoint on Windows, but she insists that she just can't understand PowerPoint on her new PowerBook. Is it me, or is that notion completely incomprehensible? It's not as if she's just having trouble with advanced features.... she can't even create simple slides! I think it's either intellectual laziness or resistance to change, or both. She is even considering selling her PowerBook because Office for Mac is too different from the Windows version. Is there any merit to her claim? 'Cause if there is, I don't see it. Someone shed some light on this for me, please! Thanks.
 

Abstract

macrumors Penryn
Dec 27, 2002
24,837
850
Location Location Location
I really don't think there's much of a difference.

If there's a problem, maybe it's because she "memorized" the location of all the necessary buttons required to access the options that she wants, and now that she uses a Mac, she doesn't know where they are anymore? Some people don't know how to use a program, only the location of the buttons she needs.
 

annk

Administrator
Staff member
Apr 18, 2004
15,140
9,351
Somewhere over the rainbow
I use Power Point and Word on both PC (have to - work) and Mac, and I honestly have never thought of anything that´s difficult or signficantly different switching between the two. I can´t even say here and now if there ARE any differences, and that must attest to the fact that I find everything I need on both platforms intuitively.

So I don´t see what your mom is struggling with, unless she uses features I´ve never needed that ARE different. :confused:
 

russed

macrumors 68000
Jan 16, 2004
1,619
20
i came from a windows enviroment then i canover to mac. on both i have worked quite a lot with powerpoint and i have honestly found no problems with the macversion in comparison to the windows one. infact i would probably say the mac version is nicer.
 

puckhead193

macrumors G3
May 25, 2004
9,570
852
NY
speaking of power point, i need to do a presentation in class, i thought i would either use power point or imovie/FCE. If I make a power point on my pb and want to put it on a pc to show, is there any compatbility issues? Or what about FCE/imovie? If i make a imovie, should i export it to quicktime and pray they have quicktime installed on the computer? or should I i just run it off my pb. The school has projectors that are in the ceiling, i could always plug the cable from my pb to the project..... But the question is what cable do i need from my pb to the projector. (i have the 15") Also when i plug in the cable will my screen go blank/do i need to change and settings ( i want to know before hand so i don't feel like an a$$)
 

Logik

macrumors 6502a
Apr 24, 2004
616
0
puckhead193 said:
speaking of power point, i need to do a presentation in class, i thought i would either use power point or imovie/FCE. If I make a power point on my pb and want to put it on a pc to show, is there any compatbility issues? Or what about FCE/imovie? If i make a imovie, should i export it to quicktime and pray they have quicktime installed on the computer? or should I i just run it off my pb. The school has projectors that are in the ceiling, i could always plug the cable from my pb to the project..... But the question is what cable do i need from my pb to the projector. (i have the 15") Also when i plug in the cable will my screen go blank/do i need to change and settings ( i want to know before hand so i don't feel like an a$$)

if this is a college environment and they already have a PC hooked up to it.. if it's anything like the two colleges i've gone to then they have something termed a "smart podium" or something similar. 1 school had them built into the rooms, the other had them in a mobile cart. BOTH of them had panels that let you plug in laptops, all you had to do from there is change the input on the podium to display what was plugged into the second video cable.. usually involved one or two button presses, i'd recommend you talk to ITS or whatever it is you have at that school and see what they can do to help you.

if you plug it in (do it while it's sleeping or the like) and when you turn it back on it should be mirroring the display (at a lower resolution obviously, probably 1024x768 or 800x600), otherwise it'll be doing a dual setup, pressing FN+ F7 i think (it's a dual window looking icon on a function key) will switch between mirroring and desktop expansion.
 

Thomas Veil

macrumors 68030
Feb 14, 2004
2,636
8,862
Much greener pastures
By all means, use your PB if at all possible. It's been a couple of years since I used Powerpoint on a PC, but at that time Powerpoint couldn't play QuickTime movies. If a client wanted a movie embedded in his presentation, I had to make it an AVI. I also had to make sure that when I output it as an AVI from my Mac, I didn't use any compression that PCs don't like. That pretty much limited me to stuff like Cinepak.

I don't know it may be better today, but back then Powerpoint videos on a Windows PC were an enormous pain in the tuchis.
 

Logik

macrumors 6502a
Apr 24, 2004
616
0
Thomas Veil said:
By all means, use your PB if at all possible. It's been a couple of years since I used Powerpoint on a PC, but at that time Powerpoint couldn't play QuickTime movies. If a client wanted a movie embedded in his presentation, I had to make it an AVI. I also had to make sure that when I output it as an AVI from my Mac, I didn't use any compression that PCs don't like. That pretty much limited me to stuff like Cinepak.

I don't know it may be better today, but back then Powerpoint videos on a Windows PC were an enormous pain in the tuchis.

i agree.. though i really feel that powerpoint on the mac sucks. i had a rough time just moving slides around, it simply wouldn't let me at times and really irritated me. i plan to buy keynote 2.0 as soon as it comes out
 

shumster

macrumors member
Aug 15, 2001
54
0
One thing I have found using both PC and Mac versions of PowerPoint is the colour scheme (is that the right term?) of the graphics embedded in the presentation.

In my previous job (have now returned to the wonderful world of high school teaching - about 50% of the staff use Macs, although the official school platform is PC), I previously used a Vaio. Had a PP presentation that had CMYK graphics embedded in it. When I got my Powerbook a few months ago, the graphics came up as black, and I had to convert them to RGB (anyone know how I can batch convert CMYK to RGB?) and repaste them into the presentation in order to see them.

Just something to look out for, or if anyone has any ideas on how to workaround this problem, would appreciate it.
 

mkrishnan

Moderator emeritus
Jan 9, 2004
29,776
15
Grand Rapids, MI, USA
I've found some funny effects (actually, just Monday, when I had to scramble to re-make the missing elements :( ) with pasted pictures in Powerpoint going between Mac and PC.

I wrote my presentation on my Mac, and I copy-and-pasted some web graphics -- all jpgs or maybe a gif or two that I stole using google images :p -- into my presentation. Also a picture that I copied out of a PDF of a journal article using Preview. And three Excel charts, which I pasted in using enhanced metafile (paste special).

When I opened it on the PC, some of the graphics came up as boxes with something like "unrecognized quicktime file" in them, as did the Preview object, and one of three excel charts. Everything else imported fine. The excel chart was the big headache because I didn't have the original with me when I got to my office, so I had to re-do the chart from a paper copy! :(

Anyway, about a half hour devoted to rebuilding my presentation instead of surfing. ;) But not too too bad. All the formatting and stuff came out fine.

As far as Powerpoint on Mac vs. PC, I agree that for anyone who has "mastery" literacy on a computer, going back and forth is a non-issue. There are minor things I've had to consult help on, since I got Office.X on my Mac in December, but very rarely are they mac-specific issues. But if you've learned to do complicated things, and you really only have surface understanding (so you just memorized a set of instructions to get your effect, but you don't understand them intuitively), I guess I could see how Mac and Windows office seem very different.....
 
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