We may
like Excel 2016 a lot and think that
Word 2016 is much improved but the summary for those and their stablemate
PowerPoint 2016 is that you should definitely get them if you're already committed to the older versions. If problems with the older software are making you wary of continuing with Office, then what we're saying is you're right to look around but the 2016 versions are contenders. They're no longer mandatory, but they're contenders.
Let us say this right up front about PowerPoint: we struggle to review it on its own. That's partly in the sense that it comes with Word and Excel plus at the moment all three are only available via an Office 365 subscription. (Microsoft says you'll be able to buy a copy outright from late September.) It's also in the sense that we've been with Office for decades and the bruises and the smells leave their mark. Part of us wants to shut our minds to that because this is new software for a new age –– but we're also aware that the biggest problems Office has given us did come when we were months into working on projects rather than when we were first evaluating versions. So let's not disregard PowerPoint's history entirely.
PowerPoint's history
We once watched someone open a parcel and hold up multiple, boxed copies of Microsoft PowerPoint before looking very confused. She wasn't puzzled because they were in boxes as this was back in the 1980s when all software was. She also wasn't confused because PowerPoint is confusing. She was thrown because she thought she'd ordered mains electrical sockets.
Back then and on through the early 1990s, PowerPoint was definitely the makeweight addition to Microsoft Office. It was the new track wedged onto the Greatest Hits collection. It was the terrible movie sequel that nobody would ever buy on its own so it got bundled with the hit first film. Yet eventually it became the software everybody used and it became the word to describe all presentations.
It is the application that killed the traditional slideshow, the presentation that used actual, physical slides. We at
MacNN saw that industry fizzle away and saw how the convenience of PowerPoint trounced the quality of professionally-produced slides. That convenience is specifically that you, an individual, can make presentations without having to hire artists and it is that you can change things at the last minute. You can change a presentation while presenting it: that would've been unimaginable before PowerPoint.
Yet you just read the word 'convenience' next to 'PowerPoint' and you assumed a 'not' was coming. It is famously difficult to use and especially so when compared to Apple's equivalent called Keynote. That software got the biggest advert anyone could've made: all of Steve Jobs's presentations were done in Keynote. The software was built, at least in part, specifically for him. Presumably all of Bill Gates's presentations were in PowerPoint but you can't remember any of those.
Enter PowerPoint 2016
If you've used PowerPoint 2011 a lot, the first thing you'll think on opening the 2016 version is that it is tighter. It's still got three lines of controls but the top one – which includes things like save and undo – is now part of the title bar. The Ribbon has dropped four sections and added two so it looks neater and is shorter. The four vanished tabs are Themes, Tables, Charts and SmartArt which if nothing else were more immediately understandable than the two that have replaced them: Insert and Design.
PowerPoint 2016 is at the front with its fewer Ribbon tabs. These Insert and Design ones are now a standard across all of Office 2016 and standards are good but they're good chiefly because they mean once you know where something is one application, you can find it immediately in another. With all of Office 2016 you are going to take time to discover where things are. This rankles considering that the entire point of the Ribbon was to be much better than the old-fashioned menus at presenting you with the tools you need, when you need them. It's a reasonable thing that Tables, Charts and SmartArt have been folded into other tabs as they didn't seem like big enough or often-used-enough tools to warrant taking up entire tabs each. As unclear as we feel Insert and Design are, you know that's where these features must've gone. It's harder to fathom what the difference is between Slide Show, Review and View is.
Helping you feel Microsoft should spend more time on the Ribbon is the fact that you can find New Slide in two of these tabs: it's icon number 1 in the Insert tab and it's item number 4 in the Home one. You can well argue that this is sensible, that making such an important tool available everywhere you'll be spending your time is a good thing. There is surely nothing more important in PowerPoint than making a new slide. Except you'd think that playing the slides would be up there in a list of importance. PowerPoint 2011 included a Play button on the Ribbon in the Home tab but 2016 drops that. To play a presentation you have to either go to the Slide Show, the sixth tab, or click a tiny icon in the footer of your presentation. Keynote has a big Play button and just the one. It's in the top control bar, clearly apart from all the other controls. As the saying goes, you can't miss it.
You can't go through PowerPoint 2016 constantly comparing it to Keynote, you have to dive in and compare it instead to the job that you are trying to do. However, it's tempting, especially when there are surprising omissions in PowerPoint. You can drag a video in to either application, for instance, but you can't edit it in PowerPoint. It's not as if you expect PowerPoint to have Final Cut Pro X's feature set but with Keynote you can say that the video should play from a certain point to anther certain point rather than always start to end. It's the difference between being able to change the pace or rhythm of your presentation and having to go back out to a video editor first.
Similarly, you can't just open Keynote files in PowerPoint and start presenting. Just as with Word vs Pages, you have have to export from Apple's program into Microsoft's format. Once you do, you can open the .ppt file in PowerPoint and get what looks initially as a very faithful reproduction. Weirdly, it's not: there is a linespacing difference somehow such that a big quotation, for instance, will start higher up the screen in PowerPoint than it did in Keynote. There's no way to determine which program is getting it wrong and the effect is subtle, but it means you always have to go over your presentation before you give it. You always would, of course, but your mind should be on your performance rather than on looking for technical issues.
We also opened a converted Keynote presentation to select all of the slides and drag them over a new PowerPoint one we were making: consistently we would end up with a gap in the list of slides down the left hand side. Not a blank slide, but a gap where a slide should go. PowerPoint numbers its slides and there was no gap in the numbering, just this whitespace.
Where PowerPoint scores
PowerPoint is much better than Keynote when you want to create a single presentation that you can alter to suit an audience as you present it. So you're giving a talk that includes some technical information: naturally you're assessing and gauging your listeners as you go so you know that they want more details. With PowerPoint you can set an action: when you click on a certain word or symbol on your slide, it skips to the Really Detailed MIT-Standard part of your presentation. Or when you click on this other one, it skips seamlessly on to the Janet and John Kindergarten version.
PowerPoint can even launch other applications from within your presentation. We're struggling to think when you'd want to do this as the single most amateur thing we've seen in presentations is when you crash out of the slideshow to the Mac or Windows desktop. (Not true. The most amateur is an occasion when our
MacNN writer was the only one of many speakers who didn't have a presentation at all. That was professional: if you don't need slides, don't have them. Only, the previous speaker's last slide stayed on the screen for half the presentation and then the Windows screen saver kicked in. It was the Windows XP logo roaming around a black screen and at various times it got projected onto the face of our presenter. He reacted like a vampire faced with holy water. That was the unprofessional part.)
The Windows XP logo is of its time and PowerPoint 2016's design is of its: the templates or themes that it offers range from fine enough to deeply gorgeous. Choosing and adjusting what parts of the themes you can is much, much nicer in PowerPoint 2016 than in 2011 to the extent that going back to the old one makes you wonder if Moses used PowerPoint 2011.
There don't seem to be as many different templates but one of PowerPoint's problems has been that even if you had a million themes, people gravitate to the same ones. It's true with Keynote too except more people see more PowerPoint presentations so they can't help but become familiar with the common templates. You can set up a new template for yourself but it is a fiddly job.
In action
The world has changed even in the five years since the last version of PowerPoint. Our holy-water-scarred presenter is the only one of us who keeps notes on all his talks and says that of the last 200, he's used presentations perhaps 40 times. Extrapolating far too much from one sample, we do wonder if we're all just so familiar with presentations now that they've lost some of their effect.
Still, we don't yet know of any better way to either inform or bore the pants off an audience so we put PowerPoint through what we do when we have to do this. The aim was to recreate a day-long presentation we've been giving to various small groups which had widely varying needs. So we knew what we wanted to say, we knew where we'd had issues delivering the presentation before.
To make a long story survivable, we ended up with 82 slides that looked at least as good as the Keynote ones. We've a soft spot for Keynote's transitions rather than PowerPoint's but we've learned to make this move from slide to slide as simple as possible. We also have a soft spot for not retyping anything we can help, though, and there we hit an oddity. When we dragged a slide with text on it from one PowerPoint presentation to another and needed to change the color, Microsoft's Ribbon fought us. We found the tool for changing the color of the text but at some point on the slide we click something, somewhere, and now we were in the Ribbon's Shape Format section. We hadn't spotted the Shape Format section before and now we couldn't find the text color control.
It isn't in Design, it isn't in Insert or Review or View and the control we'd been using isn't in Home either. We have no clue where it was or presumably still is. Yet in the Home tab there is a text color control that's very familiar from Word and Excel so we used that.
Doubtlessly if we went on to more and more presentations we would get to know every nook and cranny of PowerPoint 2016. That's far from unreasonable, that's entirely fair and we would expect and hope to get more proficient at using any application. It does just niggle and rankle that for all its strengths, PowerPoint sometimes feels as if it hasn't been tested by people actually using it for presentations. Of course it has, it must have been, but it doesn't always feel like it.
Buy or not
Sometimes a buying decision is easy. If you're using Keynote and you're happy with it, stay right there. If you're using PowerPoint 2011 Edition or some other edition that's age is best measured in geologic timescales, don't stay there, run to get these new versions. You'll also get Word and Excel 2016 which could well be reason enough to go with this but application versus application, solely PowerPoint versus Keynote, we like and trust Keynote.
Microsoft PowerPoint 15.13.1 requires an Office 365 subscription, and is included for free in the price for that, which costs from $7 per month. See the
official site for details. There will be a version you can just buy and install, rather than subscribe to, and that will be available some time in September. No pricing details yet.
Who is PowerPoint 2016 15.13.1 for:
Presenters who need powerful branching features –– you know who you are –– or are deep into the Microsoft arena and like it.
Who is PowerPoint 2016 15.13.1 not for:
If you've previously been driven away from PowerPoint then it's a tough sell getting you back but this is by far the best version in a very long time.
-William Gallagher (
@WGallagher)
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