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The Ten Most Infuriating Quirks of PowerPoint

All rights to the images and trademarks shown belong to their creators or rightful owners. © Cartoon Network. I love PowerPoint—it’s pure genius, and, as Zemfira sings, I know all its little cracks inside out. But some of those cracks really wind me up. So here’s a post all about them.

Table of Contents

  1. Poor Font Handling
  2. Slide-hopping by Accident
  3. Rubbish Font-selection Menu
  4. Can’t Group Tables and Placeholders
  5. UI/UX Menagerie
  6. Text Settings Headaches
  7. No Keyboard Shortcuts for Zoom Controls
  8. Mixed Bag of Updates
  9. No Custom Table Styles
  10. Rounded-corner Roulette

Poor Font Handling

The biggest headache in PowerPoint. Embedded fonts can fly off the rails on other machines or operating systems. There are countless causes: different OSs render fonts in their own quirky ways, PowerPoint only supports certain font types, plus you’ve got licensing quirks, font-version mismatches and even differing PowerPoint versions
 it’s a whole universe of potential pitfalls. No support for alternate glyphs or font variants. Some fonts boast fancy ligatures or multiple numeral styles, but all that flair is off-limits in PowerPoint. Worse still, PowerPoint sometimes picks whichever glyph style it fancies—and you just have to live with it. PowerPoint bars you from using the fabulous ligatures in the Sapphire Regular Display font. © Hubert Jocham. There’s still no automatic hyphenation, and the kerning feels utterly random. What’s worse, if a font isn’t installed, PowerPoint will still list its name in the font menu—but render your text in a boring system face, giving you the illusion everything’s fine unless you really know what the font should look like. ⌘↑

Slide-hopping by Accident

When you’re editing a slide and edge-scroll right up to its border, one more tick of the mouse wheel will whiz you onto the next slide. It’s maddening—and frankly feels like a UX foul-up. Switching slides makes sense in the Thumbnails pane, not just because you’ve scrolled to the very edge. By the way, macOS PowerPoint and Keynote don’t do this—you stay firmly on the slide you’re editing. ⌘↑

Rubbish Font-selection Menu

All the fonts are dumped into one massive list. There’s no grouping by family, you can’t create your own categories, and it won’t even remember your most recently used fonts. Fun fact: on macOS it’s all sorted—fonts are grouped by family, and you can even whip up your own sets in the Font Book app. PowerPoint Online’s just as slick, too—you can pin your favourite fonts right at the top of the list. ⌘↑

Can’t Group Tables and Placeholders

For some reason, you can’t group tables or placeholders with other objects on a slide. It really drags out the process of arranging your content. ⌘↑

UI/UX Menagerie

Over 37 years, PowerPoint’s morphed from a humble slide-maker into an almost-anything creator, piling on features from different teams. The result? An interface that’s a proper bestiary of approaches, menus, dialogs and panels.
  • Points vs. centimetres: Line thickness is set in mysterious “points,” yet everything else insists on centimetres.
  • Sliders, or not: Some settings have handy sliders
others leave you typing numbers.
  • ’90s formatting: Much of the formatting toolkit feels straight out of the last decade of the previous millennium.
  • Ribbon vs. panels vs. dialogs: Some functions live exclusively on the Ribbon, some only in side-panels, and others lurk in deep, multi-layered dialogs.
  • Hidden pixels: You can specify slide or object sizes in pixels—but you’d never guess it, since you must append “px” in the size fields.
  • Grids and guides oddity: The “Grids and Guides
” menu item looks like a dropdown but does two jobs at once—opening a dialog and popping up a menu.
⌘↑

Text Settings Headaches

Working with text in PowerPoint isn’t just about fonts—it’s a proper faff. After a decade I’ve got the hang of how text and shapes interact, but remembering all the rules is tricky because the logic still puzzles me. Inside a shape, text can be set to one of three modes: “Do Not Autofit,” “Shrink Text on Overflow” or “Resize Shape to Fit Text.”
  • Do Not Autofit – text won’t wrap when it bumps into the shape’s border.
  • Shrink Text on Overflow – the font shrinks to stay within the shape.
  • Resize Shape to Fit Text – the shape itself grows or shrinks to match the amount of text or its size.
Then there’s the Wrap text in shape checkbox at the bottom, which completely upends those three modes—words only wrap at manual line breaks (↔). And to top it off, text scales independently; you can’t simply stretch it the way you’d resize a shape. Slide from a Backpack Media presentation by Vlad Bugaev (pptxman).

No keyboard Shortcuts for Zoom Controls

You can’t zoom in, zoom out or fit a slide to 100% using the keyboard in Windows PowerPoint—whereas on a Mac you can. ⌘↑

Mixed Bag of Updates

Instead of fixing broken links when you export to PDF, restoring a proper table of contents or adding true high-res slide export, PowerPoint’s blessed us with automatic photo-cropping, naff border styles, a high-contrast palette toggle—and, of course, a sprinkle of artificial intelligence! ⌘↑

No Custom Table Styles

To set custom table styles you have to use XML. Raiffeisen CIB Super Mega PowerPoint Template, Vlad Bugaev (pptxman). There’s no way to set up your own table style through the interface. You can only do it by diving into the XML—definitely a path for the stout of heart. ⌘↑

Rounded-corner Roulette

PowerPoint makes you eyeball corner rounding—you can’t key in an exact radius. And when you scale a shape, its corners scale too, with no “Scale Corners” checkbox like you get in Illustrator. To top it off, only rectangles can have rounded corners. PowerPoint Rounded-Corner Shape Set by Vlad Bugaev (pptxman). Want a rounded triangle, hexagon or decagon? You’ll need to download a custom shape pack. ⌘↑  #medium #powerpoint #2k24