…I hope there’s a special place in software hell reserved for Mac Office’s PowerPoint 2004. I should be grateful that it even works at all on my MacBook Pro, but it was awful to use on my PowerBook G4, too. My favorite bits:
- Highlighting white text against a light-blue background results in a white selection bar with white text. That’s right; you can’t see the text you’ve highlighted. Brilliant.
- As with the rest of MS Office, the keyboard navigation hotkeys are slightly different than the any other Mac text editing program I’ve used.
- Trying to select multiple slides in the outline view, or drag them around, or even just selecting one slide can all be tricky propositions. The UI is really flakey.
- The program gets slower and slower as you use it until finally it takes more than a second to register a single keystroke. Restarting the application fixes it.
Of course, I should probably redirect my anger at those forcing me to author a presentation outside of the Keynote format…
Ben Galbraith 
I’ve been hyping you up with the guys from my office headed over there for JavaOne, if it makes a difference…
Hey, I hear ya. I actually *did* do my presentation in Keynote, then converted it to Powerpoint. Keynote was great. The conversion was…. less than ideal. Hans and Chet still want to kill me over it (they started doing the formatting for me while I was on vacation, bless them).
I never quite got creating a template down, but otherwise I found Keynote to be very usable. Too bad I couldn’t use it directly for JavaOne, but had to convert to PowerPoint/StarOffice/OpenOffice.
I am using Open Office for most stuff these days. It does a good job of saving stuff in MS format [so I can send it to other people] and even better is it saves stuff in PDF which is what I send clients now [none of whom want paper stuff]. I like PDF because the client can’t cot and paste stuff from my works to other stuff easily.