Life in the old dog?

Just finished editing a large PowerPoint presentation. PowerPoint can present (forgive the pun) an interesting challenge to a copy editor, being concerned, as it is, as much with the graphical as with the lexicographical elements of a piece of work.

There is a completer-finisher's pleasure in sending a finished slide deck back to a writer. Everything neatly aligned, images tided up, fonts standardized and spellings corrected.

It's also fun running through the stuff under the bonnet, simplifying and reapplying the layouts and correcting the template. PowerPoint is not only a powerful program; it also appeals to the frustrated techie in me. There's so much in it you can do by manipulating its building blocks, rather than concentrating only on the front end.

You can save yourself so much time if you know a few tricks, for example opening the XML, as I did the other day, and deleting the 100s of extra Themes that had wriggled their way into the template and were distorting the slide layouts, rather than having to go through the Master and delete manually.

Yes, Prezi may be the new kid on the block; yet for all it's snap and fizz, in my limited experience and my 'maker's' perspective, making one is anything but straightforward. Simple, efficient and powerful, PowerPoint is still more than hanging in there.