The Curse of the Red X

Oh how I love Microsoft Powerpoint. It's such a reliable program. You can always trust it to work perfectly every time.

I'm being sarcastic.

Anyone who's worked Powerpoint to the gooey insides can attest to this phenomenon. It usually occurs when the slideshow you are working on is a large file. The bigger the file size, the more likely it will run into problems down the line. But there's an ingrown evil at work here. As most people know, the Windows PC world is very jealous of the ease-of-use Apple Macintosh community. They just hate that Macs are more reliable and virtually impervious to viruses. As a reminder of this, problems arise when you open a Powerpoint file on a Mac. Yes, Powerpoint is available for the Mac platform, and yes, you can do the same stuff in the Mac version of Powerpoint as you can in the PC version. The problem occurs when you open and edit a Powerpoint file on both a Mac and a PC. When you insert charts from other Microsoft Office programs like Excel or Graph, it has to convert them as "Metafile"s when the show is opened in Powerpoint on a Mac. Therefore, problems begin to manifest themselves. Once the show gets corrupted, that's the end of it. Usually the first things to turn into the red X of death are JPEGs. As in, a picture or graphic inserted from another file. Once it becomes an X of death, your Powerpoint file is pretty much destroyed. You can replace said picture to remedy the situation, but other pictures will become red Xs of death. It's like a virus. Once one becomes infected, the rest will eventually become infected. Then you get to have fun and do it all over again! Oh JOY!!!

Windows's the name. Reliability's the game. Too bad they don't want to play.