I’ve been thinking a great deal about PowerPoint recently, and not in a good way. At Cogent Legal, we have been working hard on a number of cases that involve extensive use of PowerPoint for the client, and I often feel that getting PowerPoint to do anything involving multimedia is like trying to make a car into a boat: You can do it, but it’s a lot of work, and there will be lots of problems.

On the one hand, you can look at PowerPoint as a rich and “powerful” program in that it allegedly allows you to do so many things. The problem is that it often only purportedly does them, or it does them but not very well. This is especially true when you try to create PowerPoints that include videos. Having learned the hard way a number of lessons on the PowerPoint multimedia front, I thought I’d share them with you all so you don’t have to get caught in PowerPoint Hell—or if you do, you’ll know how to get out of it. [Read more...]