Why is PowerPoint More Complicated Than You Think? Hear What Our Design Team Has to Say

PowerPoint is a well known and powerful software that companies, educators, and creatives use consistently to share their work. Is the notorious PowerPoint as complicated as some might think? Let’s dive in and see what our design team has to say. 

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While nothing is ever perfect, PowerPoint does a great job of coming pretty close! The main features our team love are that PowerPoint is user friendly and easily shared, making it simple to send custom design templates to clients. Offline usage, animations, and slide transitions elevate the presentations that are created on PowerPoint. A more recent feature that has gained a lot of popularity is the remote collaboration aspect, where two or more users are able to edit a presentation in real time making the virtual workplace that much more collaborative. 

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PowerPoint stands out as an excellent software for presentations, but it isn’t without its flaws. The most important one is that work is not automatically saved on PowerPoint, so as you create your presentation masterpieces make sure to manually save work regularly! A few pain points our team noted were that there isn’t as much control as a designer would want. While it isn’t a design program, many of the users still want to design creatively within the software. A suggestion might be to have a more advanced version of PowerPoint that could be bought, giving users access to advanced tools such as layers, masking, and more. Finally, switching between devices can alter the fonts so they don’t appear properly on different screens. Even with embedded fonts, there are a few technical glitches in this area. 

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All of that being said, our team recommends using PowerPoint above other presentation tools because it is a more universal program and has more robust design capabilities such as animation, drawing, and more. A few of our favorite features are the crop tool, SmartArt, and charts. These allow easy customization and streamline infographic building which is key when we are creating presentations. Furthermore, PowerPoint supports importing .svg files (common format from Adobe Illustrator) which allows for quick icon edits. So as clients design with PowerPoint, we recommend creating a template with branded fonts, colors, icons, and imagery to create a uniform brand presence. Find the balance between imagery and text so that it is clear to your audience where to focus and what information is most important. White space is your friend, use it to create room for your designs to breathe. 

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Next time you are designing a presentation, remember to keep your brand elements consistent, balance the images with text on your slides, and save your work manually as you go!

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