Microsoft is selling limited version of PowerPoint 2019 on Mac charging the same or more money. There are plenty of tools and options not available on Macs, where are quite long available on PC. This is very unfair and I'm surprised that there is still no lawsuit against that company for tens and hundreds of millions $ for making faulty software. Im just going to promote that action in public so maybe in a short time we would see significant improvement of Mac version of Office, or MS will be sued for millions. In US, in EU, in UK, wherever would be possible.

In Office for Mac 2011 (and for current Windows Users) one can choose to reuse a single slide (or 2, 3 etc) from another presentation and retain the original formatting. No more! With 2016 the user is forced to add ALL slides from the secondary presentation - and the formatting is automatically changed, too. For example, if you need 2 slides from a 100 slide presentation, all 100 slides are inserted and all formatting auto-changed to the receiving presentation. This renders the feature virtually useless and costs users a ton of time that wasn't previously required. The Microsoft Tech team casually dismissed this issue in 2018i, but I can't imagine they really understaand how degraded the Reuse feature is for Mac users. Please reconsider!

The background:

Our customer has experienced a number of issues with co-authoring in PowerPoint. Issues such as the application freezing in the middle of a co-authoring session of 5 or more people, the ‘Auto-save’ switch at the top turning itself off, issues with files being duplicated on SPO with the system hostname appended to the filename.

The customer is a creative agency so they’re working with large, high quality multimedia elements in their presentations.

From the conversations we’ve had with our customer, it transpires that they aren’t the only company to have issues with PowerPoint co-authoring – so much so a number of firms have decided to stay with Google’s G-Suite product as it handles co-authoring far more gracefully.

In the end the customer left the O365 platform and moved back to G-Suite after 6 weeks of disruption and issues.

What now?

A very kind Microsoft engineer and I have been trying to troubleshoot some of the issues this customer faced so that they don’t reoccur in future. Through the course of these efforts we both came to the same eureka moment:

What if the issue here is the way that PowerPoint is handling the synchronisation of PPT files with large multimedia elements embedded?

For example. If I am co-authoring with 5 other people in the same office and then I add a 500MB video, co-authoring tries to sync that change immediately and show the full video on everyone’s device. This will no doubt lead to eventual file consistency issues as the file can’t be synced fast enough before further changes are made.

Proposal:
To resolve this, PowerPoint should instead show a placeholder instead of the actual content on other users systems.
In the case of the 500MB video above, the first frame of the video could be shown – this would sync much faster and reduce the likelihood of consistency errors.

In the case of high-res images, perhaps a lower res copy could be shown?

Then once the co-authoring session has finished the full synchronisation can occur.

The idea is pretty simple and - I think - useful: auto-generate table of contents (ToC) based on the name of each section in PowerPoint.

For example, you have three sections: introduction, sample projects, and further reading. The aut-ToC would allow you to insert a ToC including the names of each section, and e.g. the number of the first slide in that section (1,8,15), and potentially other info (e.g. number of slides in that section). As you add/remove/change the sections and their names, the ToC would adjust automatically.

There would be different lay-outs for the ToC, e.g. with bullets points, in table format, etc.