Microsoft PowerPoint

PowerPoint is a straightforward tool for making and showing presentations with an interface that is very much "what-you-see-is-what-you-get." It is also the dominant presentation software, meaning that you will probably never find a client or venue that will have problems with any presentation you created in PowerPoint. It is also rather versatile, allowing users to do far more that slide-based presentations. Users can create online slideshows, clickable infographics, and embed original graphics and videos.

Like all Microsoft products, PowerPoint has it's eccentricities. It could be more user-friendly, which is where some of the competing presentation apps excel. It is absolutely not good for creating original art or illustrations, even though many users seem to think so. If you want original graphics then you should be creating them in some other app (like Illustrator, Photoshop, etc.) and then importing them into PowerPoint.

It's the most widely used and available software (meaning so many people have it so it's likely you'll be albe to send/receive a file and open it. Using the Master slides feature which is where you can set and "fix" your logo in place to appear on each slide, have a variety of slide formats/layouts to choose from, and even set a typography stylesheet/style set.

First and foremost, the finished file sizes are always ridiculously large. This is a problem because so many people always try to email them and I find they either bounce back because they are too large to email, or I'll be out and if the PPT attachment does get thorugh, it's still so large and sort of clogs up my email and whatever is behind it.

Secondly, I know PPT is meant to be a presentation software and intended for "screen presentations" but because of this, what happens is that no matter what image is imported in (like a logo or a photo), it is automatically converted to a lower resolution image. This means if you try to print the presentation, any imported graphics will look 'meh' compared to the text.

Third, and this isn't really the fault of Microsoft or PowerPoint, but I regularly see PPT decks that look like something the person's kid put together. Most often, this is due to the fact that the user doesn't have a full understanding how to use PPT, and this results in slides looking inconsistent from the next. Alignments are off, a variety of fonts get used, and it just looks like a draft instead of a polished "presentation".

Fourth and lastly, it does not play so nice with Macs. It seems Microsoft went out of it's way to create a whole Office for Mac variety but didn't seem to do any full work on making sure it was fully compatible and played nice. It regularly loads slow, doesn't show things correctly, or just crashes (the latter is the most common).