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!

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.

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.

Please have your developers use and become proficient at a basic graphic design program. Graphic designers by and large are your primary users and happen to use software that has a designer's logic to it. Powerpoint's basic functionality and workflow consistently ignores this "best practice" development approach and causes so many discontinuities (read: Frustration) that if it wasn't so maddening it would be laughable. That said, there are some basic things that would make the program more user friendly:

1. Bezier curves: This is a extremely critical function! Illustrator provides fine controls that makes curves easy and quick to do - here are a few:

a) make points/nodes constrainable to vertical/horizontal/45 degree axes using the shift/click combo.

b) Make points/nodes moveable my arrow key increments by using the arrow keys.

1. Preferences: (related to Bezier curves) Make it possible to specify (objects/shapes and shape nodes) increments if moves using the arrow keys.




2. Get rid of you ribbon and your format pane - and use a dockable/undockable tools strategy - . Your attempts at making tools user context sensitive nearly always guesses what the user's next move and it gets in the way instead of helps. It's more efficient for a designer to choose the next move - your approach gets in the way.




3. Short cut keys: provide greater customization control. This might actually solve the lion's share of user workflow impediments. Adobe does this very well - follow their experience in this respect...because it is clear that they are listening to graphic designers who do intense production work all day long.




4. Shapes: Why make it 2-3 clicks to get to the shape making tool? It should be available as a single click - and it should be a short cut key for basic shapes like squares and ellipses. These two shapes are the foundation for any design space - don't bury them under so many clicks!

Text/font:

a) Should ALWAYS maintain formatting of the original copy!!!!

Format tool: So extremely cumbersome as it is. Use a simple eyedropper instead and make a standard shortcut key to access it....your rule should always be to eliminate the number of clicks it takes to get to the action a designer/user is trying to perform. Again - Illustrator (and other design programs like Sketch.

The basic suggestions I've provided above would go a long ways to making your users more happy using Powerpoint. Your font/text formatting also needs some work.

Feel free contact me if you'd like. I could get you thousands of designers to provide the same input I just did - and this is just a start. I will not fill out a survey so don't send me one. This is a matter you will only be able to address effectively if you have direct contact with those who use your products day in and day out like me.