PPX v PP2004. Flunked

[Harvey Waxman]

OK. I've been fiddling with 2004 and have eleven days left on the trial.

I tried this because I wanted to be able to save a presentation that would work
well on a PC as well as it does on my Mac.

Not only can I not do this but the presentation is unusable even on the Mac on
which it was created.

The main fault as I see it is that animations are terminally ill. Text boxes
render with different word wraps, adding extra lines where they don't belong,
text appears cut off along the top where they should not be, wordart elements
are useless (actually, one is fine and one is awful in the same slide),
transitions are jerky or don't work at all.

I depend on a lot of animations in one slide. I could probably work around the
issue by creating fifteen slides for every slide with fifteen animations but I
should not have to do this and pay for the privilege to boot.

All in all a failure, at least for me. PPX is a dream by comparison.

Short of redoing the entire presentation in PP2004 I see no solution. This
should never have happened, in my opinion when moving from PPX to PP2004 on the
same platform, let alone saving to a different platform.

No Sale.

 

[Jim Gordon MVP]

Hi Harvey,

PPT 2004 needs more computing horsepower and video ram than v.X. The
issues you are describing may be related to your processor speed and
available video RAM.

What osX version, processor, RAM and Video RAM do you have?

-Jim

 

[Harvey Waxman]

What osX version, processor, RAM and Video RAM do you have?

Latest version of Panther. 10.3.5
1 gig ram at 1 GHz

Profiler says this:
Type: display
Display Type: LCD
VRAM (In Use): 64 MB

 

[Jim Gordon MVP]

Hi Harvey,

PowerPoint 2004 does use a slightly different way of deciding upon where
the text will break from one line to the next, so that could explain the
text wrapping problem. It's a side effect of other improvements to
handle UniCode better and to display the text the same way that the
Windows version does I guess. I'm not sure what they could do about this
one.

You have enough computing power and RAM installed so you really
shouldn't be having animations, WordArt and transitions not playing
smoothly. I've piled lots of animations into one slide and things have
beenjust fine. Have you tried trashing PowerPoint's preferences and
plist files? That might help, but I'm not gonna hold my breath.

I don't have a solid solution for you, but I know that I'm not having as
much trouble with it as you are.

--
Jim Gordon
Mac MVP
MVP FAQ
<http://mvp.support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=fh;EN-US;mvpfaqs>

 

[Harvey Waxman]

I don't have a solid solution for you, but I know that I'm not having as
much trouble with it as you are.

Thanks anyway.

I'll stay with PPX for the time being. I'm seeing too many problems with 2004
at this time.