It’s been a pretty slow day at the office today. Spent most of the morning working on collateral for the Double Tree in Skokie, IL. They’ve got some sort of big presentation coming up next week, so I’ve been putting together a PowerPoint template for them to use that ties into all the other pieces we’ve done so far for them. After 5 minutes of working on it, I remembered why I don’t use PowerPoint for anything.

It’s absolutely terrible for doing anything beyond simple presentations. The system for creating master slides (templates) isn’t very versatile and poorly implemented. It’s inability to properly display vector graphics is maddening—and for the record, Windows Metafiles (WMF and EMF) do not count. And the damn grid doesn’t let me align my text frames to my background images (which look wretched because they need to be rasterized to display). I’m guessing the grid can probably be turned off, I just haven’t been able to find that ‘feature.’

Considering this is what the majority of the business world supposedly uses for their presentations, I’d think Microsoft would put the time in to allow for the creation of professional-looking presentations beyond their stock templates.

The newest version of PowerPoint is supposed to fix some of the templating issues, but other than that I’m sure it’s going to continue being worthless for a couple more versions.

In other news, tonight is State night, but with any luck I’ll get to spend some more time polishing up the new theme/design for the blog. It’s getting close and looking quite sharp.

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