February 29, 2004
I wrote the other day that I was considering using PowerPoint. It must have been very late or something when I wrote that, because it's just plain foolishness. I cannot stand PowerPoint. Now I have another reason.
Last weekend we bought a copy of Microsoft Office v.X. I kept hoping to find a reasonable alternative to Word for Kiara to use on OS X, but nothing else really cut it. Word is the standard for a damn good reason: it's very good. And now that Microsoft offers teacher/student price of $150 (which includes licenses for three computers in your home!), we went ahead and bought it.
Installing it caused all sorts of problems. First of all, unlike other Mac OS X software, the installer didn't prompt me for an administrator password, so I couldn't install it in the /Applications folder without manually changing the permissions. That's bullshit. There's probably a fix for it somewhere, but since Kiara's the only one using it, I just installed in in her home directory and figured I'd wait for the Office 2004 upgrade to address it again. I fired up PowerPoint about long enough to remember that I want nothing to do with it (simple enough, I'll just use XHTML or maybe Flash). At that point, for some reason I shut down.
When I booted up the next day, everything seemed fine until the login screen didn't appear. Aaargh! I ran Disk Utility a few times, but no good. I booted into single-user mode to run fsck to no avail. A page on Apple's support site suggested deleting my preferences file, but on a lark I just deleted the PowerPoint prefs, and bam! Booted up just fine.
So no, I don't think I'll be using PowerPoint anytime soon.
