switching to mac - powerpoint question

If you want to be extra careful, use Microsoft Office 2004 for Mac until Office 2008 for Mac comes out.

 

There are a couple of the real power-user things that don't carry from the Mac back to the PC. But for a fairly standard PowerPoint slide deck, you won't notice any difference at all.

So I'd say you're fine.

Cheers.

 

Powerpoint presentations made on Office 2004 for Mac will work fine on PC's in college ...

 

You have to be careful on image formats.

Some that looks fine on a Mac, won't even show up on the PC because (for some reason) it requires QuickTime be installed.

Tiff images might be the most common source of this issue.

 

I've found this usually relates to how the images were placed in Powerpoint to begin with. For example if you drag and drop images in then you will get that error. However if you "insert" the picture then all is well.

 

Ah, could be.

I encounter it time to time with my users, but that may be that they are taking the lazy shortcut.

One thing to note, OP, it's best to resize images before inserting them in PPT. A 10MB picture that gets inserted and then resized within PPT, is still 10MB. Chop it down in Photoshop (or some lower-priced equivalent) before inserting it to keep the PPT file size sane.

 

One last little note that no one really brought up:

Chances are, some of your daughter's teachers are Mac users themselves, and if they have a choice as to what computer they use in class, they often go Mac. During my senior year in high school, two of the classes that involved the most presentations (Government/Civics and Physics), were taught by Mac users (they both brought their own Powerbooks to class). So, if your daughter is going to be doing extensive presentations (they become more elaborate on a daily basis), then you might also look at iWork solely for Keynote. I suggest you still buy Office 08, but tell your daughter to try out the trial of iWork and compare the differences between a Powerpoint presentation and a Keynote presentation.

 

This was a common sight in my high school as well. The district would often provide old PCs for the teachers, but many of them would go out and get their own Macs and bring them in because they just couldn't stand using the PCs. When your daughter gets her Mac, tell her to try creating a PowerPoint presentation, and then tell her to create the same presentation in Keynote. She might find Keynote to be a better quality product (most do).

On a side note, what Mac are you buying her? If it's a portable or a mini, she would just as easily be able to take the Mac with her to school for major projects/presentations if she really wanted to use Keynote.

 

Having used both Keynote and PowerPoint, I would say that Keynote is the superior software too. True it's missing some of the power user features, but it's fantastic at doing what most users need to do most of the time.

And the whole suite of iWork is cheaper than PowerPoint on it's own.

Cheers.

 

Ahh, ok. Well, it's probably better if she's proficient with both in any case. Best of luck and be sure to ask more questions if you're ever in need.

PS: Fix the quote in your post; you need

 

Hi. Firstly congrats on making the big switch for your daughter, the mac has improved my grades significanty (Mostly due to the small things, stability, spotlight, etc).

I'm a college student and use powerpoint for my presentations, i have only encountered a problem once, when I had linked a video in the presentation to my iMac at home, suffice it to say that it didn't work. Otherwise, i've never had an issue with compatibility and everything has come out the same when presenting with a PC. With that said, keynote has some interesting features which can reallly impress your powerpoint using audience, so its a good way to cheaply boost your grades.

 

Late point to make - Something that you'll find with Keynote is that it's extremely simple to make something look extremely eyecatching. I've recently completed a Degree course in Animation, where everyone had to make several big presentations to their peers. I had only used Powerpoint once before, and my classmates all had prior experience. However, as the only Mac user, and having recently purchased Keynote, I put in the hours, and made the best presentation(The on-screen part, not me talking) out of a group of nearly a hundred. I would put that a lot down to Keynote allowing a very flexible yet polished style to what it produces.

Plus, if you get iWork, then there'll be Pages aswell, and the work templates for letters and essays kick ass!

 

Basic presentations are no problem at all.

Animations and pics/video are where you get into issues.

Note, this can happen between different versions of PPT for Windows as well.

No, if you want to be extra careful, get Parallels, load Windows and run Windows Office 2003/2007.

I am sorry, but putting a 10MB picture in a PPT presentation is not a good idea and is a waste of storage space.

Remember that the best resolution that you will see the picture is what is your laptop monitor or the projector that you are going to use -- whichever is less.

Usually a jpeg around 300-500K is enough definition for almost any picture that you want to show.

And yes, you must import the picture into PPT otherwise you are merely linking the picture to PPT so that you must keep the photos with the presentation. This is not a good way to do it if you are going to move the presentation.

Yes, for some reason, Microsoft uses quicktime for the Mac and AVI files for the Windows.

It should be the same for both versions so you can go from Mac to Windows and vice versa. Unfortunately, Microsoft doesn't seem to understand this concept with some pic formats and video files.

But other than video and pics, I've had very few problems with using PowerPoint 2003 Windows and 2004 for Mac.