Microsoft
PowerPoint for Mac Info
By Jim Gordon, Microsoft
MVP
April 2023
PowerPoint for
Mac has undergone a massive transformation in the past 6 years.
Mac and Windows PowerPoint now share the same code base,
bringing feature parity much closer.
One area where
there is a feature gap is Photo Album. PowerPoint for Windows
has a Photo Album feature, but PowerPoint for Mac does not. For
this reason I created InsertPicture.
There is a new "Lock" object feature available to Office 365
subscribers in PowerPoint for Windows that is not yet supported on
the Mac. I expect that Mac PowerPoint will get this feature fairly
soon.
User Manual
The user manual is built-in. Use the Menu Bar and choose Help,
the enter a search term to learn about the topic.
Become an expert presenter
If your presentations matter professionally (professor, instructor,
corporate marketing and branding), consider becoming a member of the
Presentation
Guild.
Additional Resources
PPTools.com
is a great site with plenty of PowerPoint add-ins and secrets
revealed.
Enterprise Support
If your job involves support Macs in the enterprise, head to the
Mac
Admins Foundation.
Extensibility
Extensibility is a fancy term meaning you can extend the
utility of software by programming it beyond what is within the
delivered product.
This table shows differences between Mac and Windows PowerPoint in
terms of the ability to program additional features yourself.
Something to be aware of when programming is that file paths are
different in Mac and Windows. Active-X is Windows only. Anything
that relies on either Mac OS or Microsoft Windows will make your
code restricted to one platform or the other unless you think it
through first and employ conditional branching.
Programming Language
|
Mac
|
Windows
|
Visual Basic for Applications
|
Lacks GUI for Userforms
|
Has GUI for Userforms
|
JavaScript
|
Yes
|
Yes
|
AppleScript
|
Yes
|
No
|
Objective-C
|
Yes
|
No
|