PowerPoint, Expectations, Washout

I do a lot of PowerPoint presentation clean-up at my job. Since I’m on a Mac, I use Keynote which is about twenty times easier to deal with than PowerPoint. But the end product needs to function in PowerPoint in Windows.

Keynote has lots of super-slick effects and transitions which always wows the audience. Unfortunately, these tend not to translate well when exporting to PP. But I’ve done enough of these that I’m aware of what exports well and what doesn’t, so I don’t use the fancy stuff if it’s going to end up on a PC.

Or so I thought.

The project this morning was easy: gradient backdrop, a low-opacity image, and some type on top. No transitions, no wacky formatting…very straight ahead. Like this:

Step 2: Export to PP. Done.

Step 3: View with PP on Mac. Looks the same. Good.

Step 4: View with PP on Windows. WTF?

I’ve seen semi-transparent things in PP before…why isn’t this working? After about a half hour of banging my head on the wall, I found that if you go to Format > Picture and choose the “Picture” tab (seriously?) and then under “Image control” you choose the dropdown menu named “Color” (you’re kidding right?) and choose “Washout” you get what, under the right circumstances, might look like it’s semi-transparent, but actual transparency isn’t supported. Is this seriously the best they could do in PowerPoint, one of the most-used pieces of software in the world?

Turns out that you can only use transparency on shape objects and not on images like you’d expect.

And what’s up with it looking right on the Mac PowerPoint? Shouldn’t PowerPoint be PowerPoint and render stuff the same? Don’t these people have meetings? Apple figured this out – as strange as it is, Safari on Windows really does render the same as Safari on Mac…just like you’d expect it to. I really need to just keep my expectations low and then I’ll never be surprised that MS software doesn’t do what I expect it to.