Microsoft PowerPoint for Mac Info

By Jim Gordon, Microsoft MVP
April 2023

PowerPoint for Mac has undergone a massive transformation in the past 6 years.
Mac and Windows PowerPoint now share the same code base, bringing feature parity much closer.

One area where there is a feature gap is Photo Album. PowerPoint for Windows has a Photo Album feature, but PowerPoint for Mac does not. For this reason I created InsertPicture.

Click here for InsertPicture Photo Album for Mac 

There is a new "Lock" object feature available to Office 365 subscribers in PowerPoint for Windows that is not yet supported on the Mac. I expect that Mac PowerPoint will get this feature fairly soon.

User Manual

The user manual is built-in. Use the Menu Bar and choose Help, the enter a search term to learn about the topic.

Become an expert presenter

If your presentations matter professionally (professor, instructor, corporate marketing and branding), consider becoming a member of the Presentation Guild.

Additional Resources

PPTools.com is a great site with plenty of PowerPoint add-ins and secrets revealed.

Enterprise Support

If your job involves support Macs in the enterprise, head to the Mac Admins Foundation.

Extensibility

Extensibility is a fancy term meaning you can extend the utility of software by programming it beyond what is within the delivered product.
This table shows differences between Mac and Windows PowerPoint in terms of the ability to program additional features yourself.

Something to be aware of when programming is that file paths are different in Mac and Windows. Active-X is Windows only. Anything that relies on either Mac OS or Microsoft Windows will make your code restricted to one platform or the other unless you think it through first and employ conditional branching.

Programming Language
Mac
Windows
Visual Basic for Applications
Lacks GUI for Userforms
Has GUI for Userforms
JavaScript
Yes
Yes
AppleScript
Yes
No
Objective-C
Yes
No