Hi all- we are getting ready to make the switch, last real concern I have is for my daughter, who is in Jr. High. She will begin using PowerPoint in class this year. My worry is that she will encounter difficulties if she does a presentation at home using PowerPoint for mac, then takes it to school where she will likely have to run it on a pc... please excuse my ignorance, I have no experience with this stuff, just trying to head any problems off at the pass! Will a PowerPoint for mac presentation run seamlessly on a pc??
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.
If you want to be extra careful, use Microsoft Office 2004 for Mac until Office 2008 for Mac comes out.
No, if you want to be extra careful, get Parallels, load Windows and run Windows Office 2003/2007.
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.
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.
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.
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.