PowerPoint for Designers? Help!

I know that this is a bit off. Most Designers want nothing to do with PowerPoint, and I am one of them. It’s not made for us, it’s made for “them”. The non-designers of the the world. Unfortunately, My employer insists that I learn PowerPoint and know it well. I’ve gone in and dabbled here and there, but it seems so foreign to me. I’m familiar with good ol’ Adobe products like Photoshop and Illustrator, where you do specific things like set kerning, leading, tracking, etc. In PPt, they use super-leyman’s terms for everything, like “line-spacing” What the heck does that mean? Do you mean leading? stroke width? dash gaps? Stuff like that. I feel like my knowledge of what needs to be created is there and all the things that need to be done, I just don’t know how to mickey-mouse my way through the program to get there. This brings me to my ultimate question: Does anyone know of a great way to learn PowerPoint from the perspective of a Designer? I’ve found tons of classes, but they all seem to be aimed at the general office drones and say things like “…and then if you want to put a pretty picture in there, you do this” and they drop in a hideous clip-art from a generic bin. They also expect that you already know all the other Office products. I personally haven’t used Microsoft Word in over 20 years, so when they say things like “It’s just like in Excel - super easy!” - I’m thrown. Anyway, enough of my grumbling…
POWER POINT FOR DESIGNERS? Anybody? Thoughts? Ideas?

Honest answer, I’ve never heard of any. Whilst I don’t doubt some people do try to use PP like that, I’ve never encountered more than a screenshot embedded in a slide deck to show off what is being proposed. My immediate thought is PowerPoint just doesn’t off the fine grained level of control needed to manipulate screen assets at pixel level, which is likely what you’d need. All I feel you could get to would be an approximation of what a design might look like.

PowerPoint for designers sounds like an oxymoron, a bit like FrontPage for web designers!

What is it that you boss wants you to do in PowerPoint?

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Well, he wants me to be the Go-To guy for creating presentations, etc, which kind of makes sense, from more of a Production Artist-type standpoint, but I’m the Lead Designer/Art Director. (trying to fight the power!)

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