Macs are popular for live shows. But for PowerPoint, PC has been the standard. After all, this software was made by Windows, so it’s easy to assume that PowerPoint doesn’t work so well on Macs. And yes, there are still some differences, but now as we speak in 2024 I will claim this: Its perfectly fine to play your PowerPoint on a Mac. Slides and animations should look the same on both platforms.
But to achieve this goal, there are some some steps you need to take. In this article we will take a closer look at how you can prepare your Mac for PowerPoint presentations.
PowerPoint fonts
You need to ensure that the fonts for the presentation display on your machine. Normally, this can be solved if the presentation was stored with embedded fonts, but when you are working with live AV, you can’t assume anything. And there are some fonts with special licences that don’t allow embedding.
When you open the PowerPoint presentation, you will be informed of which fonts are missing, and then you can install these fonts manually. This is something you should always prioritise, no matter what platform you are on.
Note that there are different standard-fonts on Mac and PC, so be extra careful when opening Windows presentations on a Mac and vice versa.
Videos
Look out for videos with special codecs that don’t work on both platforms. For example, WMV is a Windows specific format, and Apple Prores works best on Mac. If you come across these types of videos, you may have to find the original video-file, convert it to an acceptable format (MP4, h264 is recommended) and re-insert the video into the presentation.
Colour differences between Mac and PC
The picture shows the same PowerPoint connected to similar external displays on Mac and PC. Notice that the Mac-picture to the left is much more yellowish or saturated compared to the Windows image to the right. This is something to be aware of, especially if your client sees these pictures in the multi-view of your video-switcher..
Quick tip: On newer never MacBooks, True Tone and Night Shift in display settings will affect external displays. Always turn off True Tone and Night Shift on your Mac when connecting to external displays for AV. If else the lighting in the room, or the time of the day, will affect the color on the external display.(then imagine what happens if you place your Mac in the dark FOH area during a show in the evening)
True Tone and Night Shift settings can be found here. Note the settings are only visible when the internal display is selected, although it affects all displays connected to the Mac.
After turning off True Tone, the displays look much more similar. Further tweaking can be done by trying different colour-profiles on your PC or Mac, or tweaking the colours on the output.
If you have a demanding client who wants these colours to be perfectly matched, it might be a good idea to use a video-switcher that has colour-adjustments on each input, for example Roland V-80HD.
Creating and editing presentations – more differences
For presenters who create the presentations, the differences between the platforms are easier to find. The keyboard shortcuts and user-interface is not identical, so if a presenter is used to Windows, and comes to a Mac and edit their presentation, they might face some problems. There are also some examples on editing features that are not available on Mac, for example working with Excel inside PowerPoin doesn’t work so well on Mac. But once the changes are stored, and you view the presentation in fullscreen, the changes made on Windows computers should display fine on Mac.
If you expect that a lot of speakers will want to edit their presentations on the fly, you may want to bring an extra PC just for this.
PowePoint presenter view
We have already made a whole article about how to use presenter view with mirror displays on MacBooks. When the presenters are on the stage they will normally want this view where they see their own presenter-notes along with the current and next slide. The screen can be controlled by the AV-crew at Front of House.
One issue to be aware of, is that most MacBooks come with an internal 16:10 display: When you mirror this on a 16:9 display, the edges can be blacked, so you dont take advantage of the whole monitor.
There are also some design-differences with how presenter-view looks on Mac and PC, but in my experience most presenters will accept both the Mac and PC design, so I wouldn’t worry about this.
Mirrored presenter view from a Mac on a 16:9 display. Notice that the edges are black. Here we also use a timer-window from CueTimer as PIP.
What is best for PowerPoint: Mac or PC?
For live AV, I think it comes down to 3 things:
1. Personal preferences
2. The available computers
3. What other software you are using along with PowerPoint.
Why not use both PC and Mac for presentations?
In a perfect world you would bring both a Mac and a PC. You can for example use the Mac as the main presenter-machine, with the PC as backup and a place where the presenters can edit their presentation. If you share the presentations across your machines through a service like Dropbox, you can do changes on the backup-machine, and they will be automatically stored on the main computer, ready to be played. And then, if somebody spills coffee on your main machine, you already have a backup ready.
Our recommended workflow: Use Dropbox or similar file sharing services for instant backup. This allows a speaker to update their presentation on a PC that is synchronised with the main presenter-mac.
Having the ability to play PowerPoint from both a PC and a Mac gives a lot of flexibility to the AV-crew. If you want to play Keynote and PPT from the same machine, you have to use a Mac. Or if you want to reserve your Mac for video-software like Qlab, then you can use your PC for for the presentations.
My advice is also to use your best possible machine for your main presentations, especially if they contain videos and animations and have a large size. I personally like to use my MacBook Pro 2021 for PowerPoint since the machine has never failed me and runs heavy presentations without a breeze. But ofcourse a lot of you will have a PC that you cant live without. One thing is for sure: We will probably never agree of whatis best of Mac and PC. Just know that using Mac for presentations is a perfectly viable options in serious events for corporate AV, as long as you follow the recommendations shown in this article.
