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Not just for presentations anymore
August 31, 2020

Not just for presentations anymore

Terra Stafford | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User

Overall Satisfaction with Microsoft Powerpoint

We use PowerPoint for almost everything: presentations, documents, printed materials, playbooks, etc. Whenever my design team tries to pull a design into Adobe Creative Cloud instead, it usually ends up back in PowerPoint. PPT is one application that allows you to be creative with create great designs, while still being editable by an entire team (not just the designers).
  • Presentation mode animations: You can make things LOOK more creative and high-tech than they actually are when you apply the animations in clever ways.
  • Text transform: Google and Apple's answers to PowerPoint are severely lacking in this area.
  • Gives you free reign of the design of the page.
  • It's easy to create layouts with the smart guides that appear as you move/resize objects.
  • I WISH they had the option to export with bleeds, so you could use pages for large format printers.
  • When you export a PDF from a letter or legal-sized paper, it adds a white border around the page, even when there was none in the design. As a designer, this drives me CRAZY.
  • Adobe Creative Cloud allows you to move things slowly with the arrows, or in 10px increments when you hold the Shift and arrow key. In PowerPoint, when you hold shift and click the arrows, the shape resizes. It would be nice if there was another way to move things with the arrows in increments of 10px with PPT too.
  • PPT claims to be able to embed fonts, but it only causes headaches. Every time we have a file that we want to embed fonts, all we get are error messages. It's infuriating that we can't use more customized fonts and share them with our clients. Everyone asks for standard system fonts, which makes the design bland.
  • We use PPT to create proposals with graphics for our clients. Who knows what our project agreements would look like without the customization we use in PPT.
  • We've had clients pay for projects that we completely build in PPT, so that's an extra revenue stream that wouldn't be there without PPT.
Adobe InDesign, Photoshop, and Acrobat are more powerful design tools. When we can, my design team and I still prefer these applications. However, I love the versatility of PowerPoint (and wish Adobe would adopt this too). We can create something beautiful in PPT and send it to a client, so they can edit the text as needed. That's something that's sorely missing from Adobe. The learning curve is way too high with Adobe products to be able to hand a document off to anyone who doesn't know what they're doing. Almost everyone has at least some exposure to PowerPoint, at least enough to make basic edits.
I've never contacted Microsoft support directly; I've only Googled the answers to my questions. But just the fact that there are thousands of posts on boards with people having random issues with PPT is a bit indicative of the state of the support for their product.

Do you think Microsoft Powerpoint delivers good value for the price?

Yes

Are you happy with Microsoft Powerpoint's feature set?

Yes

Did Microsoft Powerpoint live up to sales and marketing promises?

Yes

Did implementation of Microsoft Powerpoint go as expected?

Yes

Would you buy Microsoft Powerpoint again?

Yes

We use it for presentations as well as printed documents. We use PowerPoint when files need to be edited between us and our clients, so we can hand over a document and they can maintain it without us. However, if we want something static or more polished, then we move it into the Adobe Creative Cloud applications instead.