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Writer's pictureTom Beecroft

PowerPoint: Power or Pain?


Are you a fan of PowerPoint? Some say it’s like Marmite; you either love it or hate it. It collates everything from the next big corporate idea to the primary school animal habitat project, but it’s fair to say that along with the power to provide awesome presentations, it also comes with its share of frustration. So, let’s consider this…


Personally, I love PowerPoint. As a designer I wasn’t always an advocate, assuming I had better tools of the trade. I’ve been working with PowerPoint for clients for almost 20 years – begrudgingly at first – but I soon realised its ubiquitous offering and have embraced the opportunity to bring beautiful design to an application that people in business use all the time.


Designers will often contend that presentations can be created more quickly and beautifully using their suite of typical Adobe design tools and then saved as a PDF. In terms of speed that may be so, but someone with the right skills and the right tools can recreate exactly the same design for PowerPoint, along with the editability that a client seeks and all the interactive, animation and presentation functionality that PowerPoint can offer, above and beyond anything that a PDF can and even Google Slides.


In fact, we use PowerPoint to create Presentations, Templates, Sales Tools, Pitches, Showreels and even images for Social Media posts.


And what of the pain?



In my opinion, PowerPoint’s overwhelming downside is its limitations for font usage. Yes, you can use any custom font you like, but invariably I find that becomes impractical for many of the decks we are asked to produce due to their intended usage. Custom fonts just don’t work when your deck needs to be shared around, leaving you with an exceptionally limited suite of Microsoft fonts. The embedded font functionality is temperamental at best and generally impractical. It’s something that Google Slides have overcome with their wide range of cloud-based Google fonts on offer. Hopefully Microsoft will get there soon enough too.


Another common frustration that I witness, for myself as well as clients, is to see poorly designed templates that lead to client-made presentations having inconsistent branding, layouts and a muddle of Master slides. This is all too often due to the template not having been designed and built with the user in mind. In fact, I often see templates that are simply unusable, meaning that only one or two template slides are ever used and much of the original design intention has gone to waste.


Of course, the vast majority of people using PowerPoint don’t have natural design skills or in-depth knowledge of how to use it to full effect, meaning that even a well designed and built template can often end up looking like, well, a dog’s dinner!


At Waggle, we take enormous care and consideration when creating templates and toolkits that truly work for clients, which we trial and test before we release. We’re also experts at tidying up those dog’s dinner decks, resetting them back to the glory of the intended brand styling.


We like to be considered as the bridge between our clients and their final presentation, letting them throw in all their creativity, in their own ways. We use visual storytelling and design to deliver beautiful, considered, flowing decks. Thus, the power of PowerPoint is unleashed! A clear, concise, and consistent deck that can be edited by stakeholders, is understood to the audience and delivers the results.


What do you think? We’d love to know your thoughts on what you love most about PowerPoint and what are your biggest bugbears!

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