PowerPoint Sucks, and We All Have to Use It.

Now I don't want to go off on a rant here, but someone has to say it: PowerPoint sucks. We all know it sucks, and yet somehow we all end up using it anyway, because everybody else does. Virtually every company has it; everyone knows how to use it; and yet no one likes to make PowerPoint presentations or worse yet - sit through them.

I used to joke that Bill Gates made a show of doing charitable work because he knows he deserves to go to hell for inventing PowerPoint. It's no longer a joke. In hell, we'll all watch PowerPoint, and Bill Gates will run the projector.

In the meantime, here on earth those of us who work in an office are compelled to use PowerPoint because there isn't anything better. The program has been around since the early 1990's, and the UI changes every year or so, but the program still works fundamentally the same way as it did when it was first released. There has been no real innovation in how we organize and present information.

There are no real competitors, either. A few companies have created cloud-based tools like Prezi or Canva, but these aren't real substitutes. Some people are reluctant to use cloud-based applications for presentations that may contain competitive information that shouldn't be out in the wild. Others share a powerful instinct to use desktop applications that run on their own local computers for things that are important. It may not be completely justified or rational, but businesses are human institutions, and humans are irrational.

Of course, another software company could try to make an equivalent, standalone desktop product to compete with PowerPoint, but they know that they'd simply have no chance of making any penetration into the market.

So that's just the way things work. PowerPoint controls over 95% of the global presentation software market. If you want to make a business presentation, you're going to be using PowerPoint. If you want to work for a company and get paid, you're going to have to watch PowerPoint presentations.

Apple Founder Steve Jobs reportedly hated PowerPoint so much that he refused to let any of his corporate officers use it. If you wanted to convince him of something, you had to stand up and make your case without visual aides. Of course, Apple released their own competing product: Keynote - which accounts for about 0.1% of the presentation software market.

Keynote sucks just as much as PowerPoint anyway.

What set me off on this rant was a typical user experience with PowerPoint. Someone sent me a sales deck to fix. It featured all the wonderful things we've come to expect from PowerPoint: messed up fonts; distorted, fuzzy pictures; bullet and paragraph formatting that changed apparently at random, and an inexplicably huge file size that had resulted from some poor soul getting confused with the Slide Master template, and corrupting it.

As I started working, unwanted side panels popped open, suggesting I adopt various hideous templates, or change the wording to sound more inclusive. I swatted them away. And then, another pop-up appeared, inviting me to take a survey. Breathing heavily through my nose, I typed away like a maniac for two full minutes - only to discover that the text field I was typing in had a 140 character limit. Rather than notify me, it had helpfully reset the cursor to the top of the field repeatedly, so I was constantly overwriting what I had written moments before.

I'm sure everyone reading this has similar stories. PowerPoint has a lot of issues, and none of the new features address underlying problems that have been inherent in the product for decades: things like broken font embedding; a complicated and confusing template system, horrible image management that results in images losing quality every time they're resized, and a general, overall kludgy awkwardness that never actually makes the product unusable - just unpleasant.

I know that no one at Microsoft is likely to pay attention to this, but I thought I'd start a positive conversation about what could be done to make PowerPoint better. Who knows, perhaps if they receive enough constructive feedback, they'll consider making some innovations.

How to Make PowerPoint Better

For years, Microsoft has tried making tiny, incremental tweaks to PowerPoint without making any fundamental changes that might alienate longtime users. They've changed the UI, updated the color schemes, and added better clip art. They've failed, however, to address any of the real issues that cause so much frustration with the product. To do that, they're going to have to make real, meaningful changes. Here are some of my suggestions:

Implement a Working Document Model

Many of the issues that people have with PowerPoint stem from the fact that you work on, publish, and share the same file. Because a PowerPoint file would be useless for distribution if it was hundreds of megabytes in size, every time you resize an image, you're resizing the actual image, and not an instance. If you make a picture smaller, or distort it, or change the compression in your file and hit "Save", the original image data is gone forever.

This allows you to make a presentation and then simply send the same file to a client in an email message, but the inevitable result is that presentations will look worse and worse over time as they're worked on by different people, and slides and images are copied between decks.

This is easy to fix by creating a source document that you work on and share with co-workers for authoring, and a presentation document that you use for sharing or presentations. By working with instances of images instead of the actual file data, you could maintain all of the original image data at full resolution, and not worry about your presentation being made permanently blurry after your boss "helps" you by squeezing a photo to make it fit next to a chart. You could also publish a far more optimized presentation document for sharing that would use properly instanced images, and more efficient compression.

Make Font Embedding Work Properly

Font embedding has never worked properly in PowerPoint. I don't know if this is because their engineers have failed to make a working implementation out of an abundance of caution to avoid violating font licenses, or if they're simply not competent to test their features, but the end result is the fact that even if you go to your advanced options and turn on font embedding, it won't work.

Users have just had to accept the fact that if they want to share a PowerPoint deck, they can use Times New Roman, Calibri, Arial, or the infamous Comic Sans. Using any other font risks some weird random font showing up when they try to show their presentation to a client.

This is ridiculous. A published presentation should embed font outlines by default. Users shouldn't have to worry about stuff like this. If Microsoft is worried about the possibility of users sharing content with unlicensed fonts, they could allow them to embed fonts from an open library like Google Fonts.

Simple stuff like this should just work.

Get Rid of the Weird, "Device Independent" Content Scaling

Content scaling in PowerPoint has always been a strange hybrid of device independent scaling and fixed scaling for physical media. This was excusable in the late 1990's when monitor resolutions were ridiculously low, and you had to make provision for users who wanted to print out slides for hand-outs, but the result has always been confusing.

You know that 99% of the time, users want to display their presentation on screens, and that if they do print out slides, they usually print more than one per page. PowerPoint is not a publishing and design program and it shouldn't be confusing users with document sizes and content scales that make no sense in this context.

Users should be given the option of composing their presentations for either 4K or 1K displays, and that's it. If you wanted to add flexibility, you could allow them to define a custom presentation size, but I can guarantee that 99% of users would never bother to do so.

When users import photos, the photos should be scaled by pixel dimensions, and not by whatever the declared internal dpi happens to be. The internal image dpi is often wrong or misleading anyway.

There's absolutely no reason a 1080p image downloaded from a website should appear to be larger on the screen than a 10 megapixel image from a stock image website. Images should be scaled at their pixel dimensions so images with more pixels look bigger than images with fewer pixels. This would help less technical users avoid common issues with blurry, pixelated images.

Constrain Image Dimensions by Default

One of the most common issues one sees in PowerPoint presentations is images that have been stretched or squeezed, because at some point someone accidentally clicked and dragged on the corner of an image. This shouldn't even be a thing. Image dimensions should be constrained to proportional scaling by default. Users could be allowed to intentionally distort images by pressing the SHIFT or ALT key when dragging an image corner.

Pull Down Hierarchies and Make Things Simpler

During my time as a software developer, I learned that developers are obsessed with hierarchies. I blame the cult-like adoption of Object Oriented design patterns for this. Software engineers are are happiest when every object they create is contained by or inherits from some root, platonic ideal, and lives in a strict hierarchy. You can see this philosophy expressed in every facet of PowerPoint from the five-level deep hierarchies of bullet points and headings to the insane implementation of .xml as the native file format.

The problem with that is that ordinary people don't think that way, and it gets confusing. I have been confronted with hundreds of broken PowerPoint presentations that resulted from people not understanding the hierarchical nature of the "Master Slide" template system in PowerPoint.

Hierarchical templates suck. No one understands them, and only crazy people need them. Microsoft needs an intervention. Their engineers need to be de-programmed from their hierarchy and class cult, and they need to implement something that's easier to use.

Instead of the Master Slide concept, how about simply allowing users to design template slides the way they like, and include them in their deck?

Every element in a slide derived from a template should also be editable. Most people actually aren't very good at designing templates that fit every situation, and they often need to move things around or change them once they actually start working. Let them do that.

The system of styles and classes for text presentation also needs to be simplified. No one, unless they are a website programmer or are writing a 200 page government document, is going to use five levels of bullets and headings. Users get frustrated with this complexity and usually abandon it altogether. Instead they simply end up just making every text block "normal" text, and messing with it until it looks right.

If users don't engage with the tools you give them, this means that you need to make them easier to use.

Make Animations Better with a Timeline tool

I have never seen an animation tool more hopelessly convoluted, unfriendly, and unnecessarily confusing than the animation panels in PowerPoint. These have remained essentially unchanged since the 1990's and have been frustrating users ever since. The fact that every animation is a separate entity attached to a page object results in a cluttered workspace that quickly becomes unusable. The fact that every page object is displayed in its starting position as soon as you click on another makes it difficult to animate multiple objects that interact in the same space.

This problem was solved decades ago by virtually every other software tool that has an animation feature. They use the concept of a timeline to allow you to preview the position of multiple objects over the course of an animation cycle.

PowerPoint should implement this as well. Users should be allowed to scale the animation timeline in a range between 1 and 30 seconds, and use a simple keyframe interface to position page objects where they want them throughout the animation.

If you wanted to get fancy, you could allow users to draw splines for animation paths, and set easing or apply Penner equations to animations for smoother, more dynamic motion.

The power of a timeline tool for animation is that it allows users to see where all of the document objects will be positioned on-screen at every point of the animation, and it allows users to position things very precisely so they can interact with each other. This is currently not possible within PowerPoint unless you deselect the current object, and preview the slide animation. Currently, animating multiple objects that interact with any kind of precision is virtually impossible.

You wouldn't need to add a whole lot of functionality or complexity to an animation system like this to make animation in PowerPoint a whole lot easier and more fun to do.

Introduce a Scene Graph and Document Layers

PowerPoint could be much improved with the introduction of the concept of a "stage" or scene graph, and document layers.

A scene graph is a collection of all of the objects that can be rendered to the screen. It can include areas that aren't actually rendered as well as the camera view, or "stage" where objects are rendered. This is a useful concept that has been applied to good effect in many presentation, design, and animation programs.

It would be extremely useful if PowerPoint users could position objects "off-stage", and then animate them into or out of view. Right now, if you try to position an object outside the boundaries of a slide, PowerPoint helpfully assumes you want to work on another slide, and changes the view. This is immensely frustrating if you're trying to create a dynamic presentation.

It's also possible for things to very quickly get out of hand if you're trying to compose a PowerPoint slide with a lot of things on it. Because they are all part of the same slide object collection, it's very easy to accidentally click on something that you don't want to move. It can also be incredibly frustrating trying to work on objects that overlay each other, since you have to continuously be changing the stacking order of objects in the slide.

Most design programs solve this problem by allowing you to create separate collections, or "document layers" that allow you to stack things on top of each other, and to change the order of layers. By allowing users to place objects in a layer, and then "lock" or "unlock" the layer, you can reduce the possibility of things accidentally getting moved to where you don't want them.

These are fairly big and fundamental changes to document workflow, but in my experience they are very intuitive, and I believe PowerPoint users would very quickly come to love these features.

Rework Table Formatting

Table formatting in both PowerPoint and Word still works more or less the same as it did in the first iterations of these products. It's insanely kludgy and confusing. There's no need for this. Users should be able to select multiple table cells and define the cell borders, shading, and padding with a context menu.

The current model of setting formats by table, row, column, and cell results in too many weird conflicts with settings overriding each other, and is the cause of one of the main problem points in presentation formatting. I have wasted many hours trying to fix presentations sent to me with ugly, broken tables that the original authors had simply given up on.

Chuck the Cheese

While the infamous "Clippy the Office Assistant" is no longer to be found in Microsoft products, his irrepressibly irritating spirit lives on. Microsoft Office products are forever trying to "help" users with condescending content suggestions and amateurish-looking templates. I find it strange that while the majority of Office product users work at companies with 100 employees or more, all of the templates look like they were designed for home-based businesses.

In PowerPoint, this results in an endless supply of ugly design suggestions that few people ever use. What's worse, is that a lot of slide transitions and animations that may have been acceptable in 1995 look either ironic or amateurish now. If you don't believe me, take your company's current corporate backgrounder deck, and show it at your next board meeting with randomly selected transitions from the "exciting" category between each slide. I guarantee you'll get a reaction. Your boss might even suggest you take a vacation.

The same holds true for the built-in object animations. About 80% of the canned animation content is older than most of your employees, and it looks like pure cheese.

It's time to chuck the cheese, and restrict templates and preconfigured animation to a set of basic tools that people will actually use.

It's Hopeless Anyway

There. I got that off my chest. PowerPoint sucks. There are ways it can be improved, but I'm not holding out any more hope that it will happen than I am for lower taxes or more vacation time. With all its flaws, PowerPoint continues to dominate the global presentation market just the way it is.

Maybe we deserve it. After all, the wages of sin is more PowerPoint.