Microsoft PowerPoint

Raised as a usability problem by 18 people on Hacker News over 18 years (2008–2025), in 17 threads.

People raised many different problems with Microsoft PowerPoint, but no single problem has yet been raised by 3 people in 3 different months and threads.

Unreviewed issues were grouped by machine: Claude Haiku labelled each comment as a usability complaint, named what it's about and summed up the problem in a line, and a small model grouped similar problems. Nobody has checked them by hand. Expect mistakes.

The newest 18 complaints

Couldn't figure out how to type an em dash in PowerPoint2025-03-28
Sentences get deleted right after the user types them2023-11-27
View freezes after reopening file, so zoom and scroll stop responding2023-09-10
Clicking Design Ideas shows an unavailable error, though user settings seem to control it2022-11-07
No way to find or reset the cloud data collection opt-out2022-10-27
Hard to make slides look good without effort2022-06-29
Indent and unindent are not opposite operations, so bullet lists break2022-02-06
Web version of PowerPoint is described as unusable2022-02-06
Template files are so infuriating to use that users copy full presentations instead2021-07-21
Must open PowerPoint and copy-paste the figure into the document on every revision2020-02-17
No visible scroll bar, and click-drag rearranges slides instead of scrolling2019-02-27
Excel-to-PowerPoint links are unstable, break formatting, or need many manual steps2019-01-20
Bullet and line spacing behavior is unpredictable when typing, so users can't tell what will happen next2018-02-04
Feels very slow and frustrating to use for wireframing2016-06-10
Editing slides in PowerPoint or Impress is cumbersome to the commenter2016-06-05
Setting up the presentation on a second display takes minutes and exposes distracting desktop clutter2010-07-31
Excel graph insertion and editing fails and crashes several times daily2010-03-13
Presentation tool is frustrating to use, consuming time that should go to content2008-09-06