PC to Mac and Back

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If you need to create presentations on the Mac and move them to the PC (or vice versa), this is a good place to start. And this is just a start. We'll add more info as we learn more. Your suggestions and corrections are very welcome.

Before we start, consider that you'll be dealing with different versions of PowerPoint as well as different platforms. This is mainly about PC/Mac issues, so we won't take PowerPoint version differences into account here other than this general set of rules:

PowerPoint 4 on both platforms are almost identical. There's no Mac equivalent of PowerPoint 95. If you're using PowerPoint 4 or PowerPoint 95, consider upgrading. You have no idea how much better PowerPoint can be.

PowerPoint 97 (Windows) is very much like PowerPoint 98 (Mac).

PowerPoint 2000 (Windows) has no equivalent on Mac, but it only added a few new features to PowerPoint 97. For all practical purposes, you can consider PowerPoint 97 and 2000 (Windows) and PowerPoint 98 (Mac) pretty much the same.

PowerPoint 2002 (Windows) and PowerPoint 2001 (Mac) both added multiple masters and a lot of other new features and bring the Mac and PC versions into rough equivalence again. 2002/2003 also have motion path animation, supported by the PowerPoint 2003 viewer. Mac PowerPoint versions can't create motion path animations but beginning with PowerPoint 2004 for Mac, presentations with motion path animations created on Windows can be viewed properly on the Mac.

PowerPoint X (Mac) is roughly equivalent to PowerPoint 2002 (Windows) again. It's the first PowerPoint version that's fully compatible with OS X.

The PowerPoint 97 Viewer for Windows is effectively the same as PowerPoint 97 (Windows) without VBA.
The PowerPoint 2003 Viewer for Windows is effectively the same as PowerPOint 2003 (Windows) without VBA.
The Mac Viewer is effectively the same as PowerPoint 98 (Mac) without VBA, so the PowerPoint 97 (Windows) and PowerPoint 98 (Mac) viewers are roughly identical.

The PowerPoint Viewer 2003 (Windows) adds support for PowerPoint features that are new since PowerPoint 2002.
There's no equivalent viewer for Mac.

All versions from PowerPoint 97 (Windows) and PowerPoint 98 (Mac) onwards share the same file format. Newer versions can open files from older versions. Older versions can open files from newer versions, but will ignore any new features they don't support. The sole exception is password protection. Only PowerPoint 2002 and 2003 (Windows) support passwords; other PowerPoint versions are unable to open password protected files.

NOTE: PowerPoint 2004 for Mac includes a new feature that is designed to alleviate many of the common headaches in optimizing presentations for other versions and other platforms. This new Office-wide feature is called Compatibility Report, and can be accessed easily from PowerPoint from the Tools menu.

Learn more about Compatibility Report here

Create on Mac, move to PC

• Save your files in PC 8.3 filename style, using PPT (for PowerPoint presentations) or PPS (for PowerPoint shows) as the extension ... the part after the period. Your filenames should look like XXXXXXXX.PPT or YYYYYYYY.PPS
• Uppercase/lowercase doesn't matter, but don't use punctuation characters or spaces in your filenames. Some punctuation marks are PC-safe but may cause problems in email or web applications if files are converted. Dashes (-) and underscores (_) are safe, though.
• Quicktime-compressed images won't work on the PC
• Quictime movies seldom work on PCs. Use MPEG or AVI instead.
• Links to external graphics files will break. Embed all graphics.
• Links to most media files will break UNLESS you copy the media file to the folder where the PowerPoint file is, and only then insert it. See Links break when I move presentation for more information.
• Check Format, Replace Fonts to see what fonts are used in your presentation. You can safely count on Arial, Times New Roman, Courier and Symbol being present on every PC. Tahoma and Verdana will probably be present on any PC with Office 97 or later, but may not be there if the PC has only the free PowerPoint Viewer. Mac versions of PowerPoint can't embed fonts.
• Use only RGB color for your PowerPoint graphics. PowerPoint will convert CMYK or Pantone colors to RGB anyway. It's better to do it yourself so you can control the conversion. In case that's not a convincing argument, try this: PowerPoint may substitute a red X for CMYK graphics. Ouch. Stick with RGB.
• Ungroup, then regroup imported graphics to convert them to PowerPoint shapes. Do the same to inserted charts if you don't need them to be editable on the other platform.
• Don't squeeze your text too tightly into placeholders. Font substitution and slight differences in text rendering on Mac vs PC can cause your text to get truncated or spill out of too-tight text boxes.

There are more Mac to PC tips here on Microsoft.com

Create on PC, move to Mac

• Save your files in PC 8.3 filename style, using PPT (for PowerPoint presentations) or PPS (for PowerPoint shows) as the extension ... the part after the period. Your filenames should look like XXXXXXXX.PPT or YYYYYYYY.PPS
• Don't use punctuation characters or spaces in your filenames. Some punctuation marks are Mac-safe but may cause problems in email or web applications if files are converted.
• Ungroup, then regroup imported graphics to convert them to PowerPoint shapes. Do the same to charts if you don't need them to be editable on the other platform.
• Links to external graphics files will break. Embed all graphics.
• Links to most media files will break UNLESS you copy the media file to the folder where the PowerPoint file is, and only then insert it. See Links break when I move presentation for more information.
• Don't use WMV (Windows Media Player) files for movies or sounds. AVI or MPEG are better choices. WMP9 for Mac FAQ explains why and offers some workarounds. Several knowledgeable Mac users have suggested third party products such as Flip4Mac to enable Windows Media Player files on Mac.
• Watch your fonts. Check Format, Replace Fonts to see what fonts are used in your presentation. You can safely count on Arial, Times New Roman, Courier and Symbol being present on most Macs. Tahoma and Verdana will probably be present on any PC with Office installed, but may not be present if the Mac has only the free PowerPoint Viewer. Mac versions of PowerPoint can't use embedded fonts.
• Don't squeeze your text too tightly into placeholders. Font substitution and slight differences in text rendering on Mac vs PC can cause your text to get truncated or spill out of too-tight text boxes.

X-Platform in either direction, PC to Mac or Mac to PC

• Embedded objects (Word tables, Excel charts/sheets, graphs, etc.) may not translate well. Wherever possible, use the tools built into PowerPoint (ie, PowerPoint's table editor in PPT2000 and up on PC, PPT-X and up on Mac) rather than objects created in external programs.
• If you must use objects from external apps, ungroup then immediately regroup them before you send them to the other platform. This converts them to PowerPoint shapes. If they don't ungroup cleanly, it's a near-sure thing that they'd have caused problems on the other platform anyhow. Treat ungrouping as an Early Warning System.
• Whereas PowerPoint for Mac uses QuickTime to handle audio and video, the Windows version uses built-in Windows functions (MCI) to do so, which greatly limits the amount of file types that can be viewed on both platforms (only a few, like MPEG and AVI can be handled on both). More information on this here
• Fonts are "encoded" differently on PCs and Macs. That can cause some characters to change or disappear when your files move between platforms. See Mac vs. PC Character Encoding for more information and a PDF that includes a chart comparing the two encoding systems.
• Slide Shows - when you view a Kiosk Mode slide show on the PC, you can use the Tab key to move from one hyperlink to the next and the Enter key to activate the hyperlink. This doesn't work on Mac.

Contents © 1995-2008 Stephen Rindsberg, Rindsberg Photography, Inc. and members of the MS PowerPoint MVP team. You may link to this page but any form of unauthorized reproduction of this page's contents is expressly forbidden.

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