Okay, Maybe It's a Microsoft World After All...

It takes a big man to admit when he's been bested by a piece of software—but I haven't been yet.

Over the past year or so, my good friend D. and I, between each other, have probably figured out everything that can be done using Microsoft Office programs—such as Word and PowerPoint—for design purposes. Not because we're masochists or have nothing better to do than try to make the most design-unfriendly software in the world do things it should never have been purposed for.

But because the business world runs on Microsoft Office—a fact of life that all us Adobe-bred designers have, at some point, had to come to painful terms with. As such, there's no getting around a corporate designer's having to incorporate Office into his or her 'graphics workflow.'

For all my disdain of Microsoft products, I do have a modicum of respect for PowerPoint, which is actually pretty cool at what it does best—just slide shows, and nothing else!

So for the benefit of corporate 'graphics jockeys' everywhere, I will be posting excerpts of emails that D. and I have traded back and forth, in our mutual efforts to overcome some common—and not so common—hurdles associated with having to design for Microsoft Office. Keep an eye out...