Things I hate about Powerpoint

We do a lot of presentations within my group, and I am preparing for a conference talk at MIT in June, so I have been spending a lot of my time preparing Powerpoint slides. Powerpoint is a crappy product. Microsoft should be absolutely ashamed to distribute (and charge for) such a needlessly trying piece of software. OpenOffice.org has a similar program, Impress, which is far superior, but because some alignments and symbols are ruined when switching back to Powerpoint, and because my lab has not yet fully embraced open-source software, I am forced to use Powerpoint instead. In an ideal world, I would only create LaTeX slides because of the amount of equations I need to include in my slides. So here is the list of things I hate about Powerpoint, along with some suggestions and comparisons to other products:

• It is difficult to create "true" master slides.

  No matter what I do, I find myself constantly changing font colors and sizes so that my slides are consistent when I need to add extra text boxes, etc.

• There is no alignment tool.

  It's bad enough that you can't distribute items in Powerpoint, but you can't even select a bunch of images and quickly ensure their left edge is identical. Instead, you are forced to either create a grid with snap points or to right click and change the positions. This is too much of a hassle for me. In OpenOffice, I can simply select everything and choose to align the objects or distribute them with the click of an easy-to-find button.

• I would rather get new braces (with chains!) than include equations.

  I don't know if it's just my copies of Powerpoint, but it is seemingly impossible to use Equation Editor (which is also abysmal) from within the program. You are stuck either using a painful copy-and-paste process or sorting through the grossly insufficient symbol collection. Impress allows you to use its LaTeX-like equation editor, and LaTeX was has evolved to make equation-writing a breeze. Microsoft seems unaware that scientists and engineers throughout the world spend hours on their presentations because it has only considered the needs of businessmen.

• Including subscripts and superscripts takes six steps.

  First you have to type what you want, being sure to include a space. Next, you select the text and right click. Then you choose "font." Next, you click the appropriate checkbox. Finally, you close the box. In OpenOffice, I type ctrl-shift-p for superscript and ctrl-shift-b for subscript, followed by my letters, followed by the same command. I don't have to stop and touch the mouse. In LaTeX, the process is even simpler.

• You can't add generic accents to letters.

  If the accented letter you want isn't in the aforementioned symbol collection, you're SOL. Forget about using some simple control sequence to add a tilde over your 'w;' it's just not going to happen.

• Every time I insert a new picture, my other images' alignments are lost.

  I sometimes spend a lot of time annotating my images because I want the fonts to be consistent. When I insert a new picture, the old image is moved, and I have to pain-stakingly move it back to its original location. Not only does this not happen in OpenOffice, but in that program, you can also choose to lock the position of any item in a slide, preventing you from accidentally moving it.

• Most of the default designs are terrible.

  Who developed these color schemes? People who use Powerpoint are actually encouraged to create illegible slides featuring black text on a navy field. While they offer a suggestion about legibility when you select your layout, most of the color schemes do not follow their rule of thumb.

Well, that's all I can think of for now. I need to hit the hay anyhow. Busy day tomorrow...