Don't be amazed how well the dancing bear dances, but that she dances at all.
Powerpoint is the dancing bear of software. It gets up on its hind legs, staggers around a bit, and folks applaud, But it's not going to the Bolshoi any time soon.
It does a great many things-almost all poorly. Surprisingly, the only thing it doesn't do is cause a computer to burst into flames when the startup screen displays.
Powerpoint and Posters:
If at all possible, use another software to make posters. Powerpoint was not designed for this job. Powerpoint. Is. For. Slide. Shows. And. Overheads.
Because Powerpoint was not designed for poster-size print-outs, there may be additional hourly charges for correcting your files. By submitting a Powerpoint file for poster printing, you agree to pay these additional charges as necessary, as well as the print-out costs for any intermdiate testing that proves necessary.
Some of the issues with Powerpoint:
Page size: Powerpoint is limited to a 56 inch page size. If you do a poster in Powerpoint, that's all you'll be able to get. While powerpoint does have a fit to page option, it doesn't always produce what you expect. Background images commonly fail to scale properly. NOTE-THE MAXIMUM PAGE SIZE FOR POWERPOINT POSTERS IS 40 INCHES BY 56 INCHES. Background images at the full page size often fail to print completely.
Page Orientation : There is no effective way to mix horizontal and vertical pages in a presentation. Some folk have suggested linking multiple presentations as a work-around. While possible, it is tedious to achieve.
Printing: All marketing claims to the contrary, Powerpoint is not quite WYSIWYG. There can be quite annoying shifts in type specification, size, and line break. This is true for both platforms.
Fonts: Powerpoint is well known for changing font spacing when going from one machine to the next-even on the same platform. Even on its native platform, what appears on the screen may not be what you get as output.
Color Matching: Harder to do than one might think. The color palatte is limited in size, and I'm not entirely certain it's a 24 bit product. Add to that the "transparency" option in the custom color dialog and it becomes almost impossible to match an imported color to a Powerpoint native one. (can be done, just takes some work)
Page Setup: Up until recent versions of Powerpoint one of the page size options was "On-screen Slide Show." The result of this was that most people who were intending to have slide made from their files were selecting a page format that didn't match the shape of a 35 mm slide. People should have been choosing "35mm slide." Unfortunately, if you change the page shape after creating slides, Powerpoint does not scale the contents uniformly. Any graphics or text will be stretched or squeezed like this . . .
While the scaling issue is still present, the setup option has been renamed "On-screen Show", which should at least eliminate some of the confusion.
Imported Graphics and Rotated text: Graphics produced in other applications, including Excel, which contain text rotated from the horizontal may not print properly to a film recorder. The text is often jagged, and usually contains other flaws.
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