Hi all, I have just finished helping my daughter with a school assignment to be presented using powerpoint.
We have powerpoint for mac and keynote. She elected to create in keynote and export to powerpoint. After some minor fixes she thought all was ready to go. Not so! There are real problems with formating and multimedia when going from mac to pc with power point. Mind you we have found that redoing the project in windows had problems also when going from pc to pc, even if electing to embed the fonts.
What are others experience? What is the best way to make a what you see is what you will get presentation on a mac if you need to use a pc to present it?
Also I noted quicktime files dont appear to work with powerpoint - I had to convert all movies to wmv - a pain in the $#!@.

All ideas will really help me when I have to rescue her again next time.

Can you export to an interactive quicktime movie perhaps?

The last time I made a Keynote for a school project, I exported the presentation to an interactive Quicktime file. Worked like a charm.

(Well, it would have if the teacher had Quicktime installed.)

For really simple stuff you can export to PDF, then use Adobe Acrobat to present. Only really works for still frame based presentations, but they'll look the same (ie. no font issues).

Exporting to QuickTime will create MASSIVE files, so it's not really an option in most cases.

I know this isn't what you want to hear, but presenting on a Mac with Keynote is probably the best way to go if you can swing it... Its pretty easy to run circles around Powerpoint with Keynote, but only if you can use all it's nice transitions (something that's lost if you export to Powerpoint).

Edit: Maybe I'm wrong about QuickTime. My experience has been massive files, but maybe that's because I'm not making interactive ones.

swapping between powerpoint and keynote will almost always result in fairly big and annoying formatting changes. This leaves with you with primarily non-powerpoint options, such as those suggested above, and little else. I pretty much use the PDF option for my presentations (but that's primarily for handout reasons).

you might try fixing the powerpoint slides after export from keynote by going through master slide setups, but it is going to be a pain whicever way you do it.

FWIW, powerpoint (in the MS office suite) has a number of different output/saving options; from memory, there's options to embed fonts and also to save with compatibility for powerpoint '97, 2000, '03, '07 etc etc, for every MS office release.

If you make a powerpoint presso in 2003, (as I've done), then save it with (for example) Office 2000 compatibility, I think it tells you which transitions/effects are incompatible. When I did it, the other computer displayed it completely differently - transitions weren't there, image timelines didn't work properly. In other words, it's almost always totally inconsistent when run on an older version of powerpoint.

Summary : MS office = pain in the arse, but inescapable :/ It would help to know what version the other computer is running.

Thanks for the replies. This why I love this site. Plenty of input with problems.
I tried the interactive quicktime file and it seems the best of bad situation. The files are huge though.
Microsoft stuff is just so poor when you look at how easy the mac is.