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Comment by MichailP | Hacker News Reader

Anybody knows whats the catch with MacBook owners plugging their own laptops directly to projector during conference presentations, while others use already available common laptop and just transfer their ppt? It seems a bit snooty :) Although there are benefits, your ppt is not made available to everybody.

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Even today, there are issues with fonts and the like causing issues with PowerPoints made on a Mac running in Windows. It's not being snooty - it's the very real fear that something will go wrong. For any Mac users who have had that happen to them, it's very embarrassing. It is more common with embedded figures and things like that for fonts to go all wonky. Even a PDF export doesn't always go well. General rule of thumb - the more complicated your slides, the greater the likelihood that things will go wrong.

Probably using Keynote instead of PowerPoint. While Keynote can export to PPT, the result is not satisfactory. Usually Keynote presentations are exported as PDF instead.

Is Keynote that superior to MS PowerPoint?

Fonts on Mac and Windows are not the same, and export process does not always export everything correctly.

True, and I think neither PPT or PPTX can embed fonts in them, so the result is subpar, while a PDF can embed fonts, but cannot embed the transitions.

PowerPoint for Windows can embed fonts, the Mac version cannot.

PowerPoint's cross-platform support is still a shitshow. Embedding a video on one platform and presenting on another is unlikely to work, especially now that QuickTime for Windows is end-of-lifed so one platform is even less likely to have those codecs. I think it's still possible for the bullet glyphs to not always match (set them to empty circles on one platform, get displayed as daggers on the other), though this is less common than it used to be.

Both have pluses and minuses. Mostly, when you purchase a Mac, you now get the Apple productivity suite (Pages, Keynote, Numbers) for free.

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