HUGE SIGH. I spent a week designing a 20-slide PPT deck on my company’s history for an MBA class. Each slide is designed to resemble a 2-page magazine article, each article focused on a company milestone. After getting everything looking great, I returned to the doc last night. Everything looked great.
This morning, I opened the doc (I did NOT restart my PC) and the headlines and body text are messed up. The headline font is a different font and its layout is way off. The body text no longer fits the page the same; it’s longer in length.
This is 2010 PPT for Students. This has happened many times before. It’s the same story: I work for hours to get things looking great, then I return to the PPT doc a week or month later – ON THE SAME PC – and the .pptx slide layouts are messed up in some smallish but aggravating way. The headlines are way off, the body text is much longer.
Clearly, I don’t have professional layout skills or I’d be using Adobe InDe$ign, which costs about $800. I do my best to design these slides. One day, they’re looking great. A week later, things have shifted.
I know “change your tools” isn’t the response you really want to hear, but I agree that 13 year old software is getting pretty long in the tooth. LibreOffice supports PowerPoint format too, and it’s free.
I had enough of that as well. I don’t us any fancy PPT stuff like animation, so I solved the problem by designing in word and the printing to a pdf file which is then stable (at least if you embed fonts)
The only extra step was to design a (almost) landscape page that had the same aspect ratio as the classroom displays.
My wife, who is doing her last semester as a part time instructor at the local community college (hooray for finally getting her PhD [ brag brag brag ] ) is always fighting similar issues. The software she can use for free via the school was glitchy, outdated, and unsupported. When it didn’t work, she was given the same answer: upgrade.
Right now, she instructs from pre-printed simple slides, and does on the fly illustrations using her 2-in-1 tablet with smart stylus, which works for Calculus Based Physics 101 students, but wouldn’t make for an impressive presentation.
I too use LibreOffice, after previously using Open Office, and say it does good work but… yeah, it’s not always 100% compatible with whatever version of PP you may need to do the presentation on! And that’s still going to be a problem if you update to a new version of PP yourself, but the version in class is much older. Of course, if you’re just casting from your own, portable system to screen, it may be moot.
Especially in the last case, I’d consider one of the (few) benefits of the modern Microsoft office philosophy - you never own the software, you’re just renting it. So, if the ‘free’ limited feature 365 works for you, great, otherwise get the ‘personal’ (I think they still have a student version, but too late at night for me to go looking) version for $6.99 a month just long enough to do what you have to do.
Even if that does fix your problem, I’m still curious why it was occuring in the first place. In my (limited) experience with PowerPoint, I’ve never seen anything like that happen. So I’m hoping someone who has, and managed to figure out what was causing it, will chime in.
Are you sure you don’t have two versions of PPT on your computer (before you add Office 365)? Or a PPT viewer only program.
Do you load the PPT the same exact way either:
Clicking on the doc
Starting the app and opening the doc
Failing to properly load a file it created is one level of bug, but doing that inconsistently is a whole other level. I’m curious if sometimes you open with 2010 and sometimes with another program without realizing it.
CaveMike, initially I scoffed at the possibility of my having two PPT versions, but I will need to explore this when I have a moment. In the meantime. I now have 365.
Yes, I do load the software the same each and every time, by clicking on the doc.