Why is there no latex input in Powerpoint for Mac, but there is for Word?

Hi

Rohn's history is from a Windows perspective. The first version of Microsoft Office was announced on Super Bowl Sunday, January, 1984. Here's the ad that announced Microsoft Office:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2zfqw8nhUwA

Note that this was before there was such a thing as Microsoft Windows. I don't know which date to use as the official birthdate of Microsoft Office. You could use SuperBowl 1984 because that's when it was announced, or you might choose the day in March 1984 when the product was released to market.

Microsoft PowerPoint was not initially part of Microsoft Office. It was just Word and Excel. Microsoft purchased PowerPoint. PowerPoint Version 1 was in 1987. Here's a screen shot from version 1.

As with Word and Excel, PowerPoint originally was Mac-only.

Eventually, Microsoft released Windows versions of Mac Word, Excel and PowerPoint. Please understand that the Windows versions of these applications all derive from the Mac, not the other way around.

For a while, the apps were identical on Mac and Windows. That was the case until Office version 4.2.1. Mac users hated it because it was very Windows-like and no longer Mac-like. For Office 2004 Microsoft split the Windows and Mac teams from each other and formed the Mac Business unit.

From Office 2004 through 2016, the Mac and Windows versions had separate code bases. The only requirement was that the files made on one platform must be compatible with files made on the other. The interfaces and feature sets diverged considerably. There were many mac-only features and many windows-only features.

During the existence of Office, personal computer processors went from 8-bit to 16-bit to 32-bit and then 64-bit. Each change required some changes to code on both platforms. On the Mac, Microsoft went with 32-bit applications for Office 2011 and the first releases of 2016. On Windows, both 32-bit and 64-bit versions were (and still are I think) available. Microsoft learned from their experience with Office for Windows that maintaining both 32-bit and 64-bit versions was a giant expense and hard to keep up. So rather than making a many years' long transition from 32 to 64-bit on the Mac, they did it in a single update. Much more sensible! Also, if you notice there was no Office 2014 for Mac. At that time an idea became policy in Microsoft: one code base for all platforms. With the advent of Microsoft Office for iPod, iPad, Android and Windows phone, Microsoft introduced the single code base approach to Office. For Office for Mac, Microsoft combined the concept of a single code base plus upgraded from 32-bit to 64-bit in a single release of Office for Mac: version 16.16, which is where Office 2016 and Office 2019 begin to fork in different directions with Office 2016 having a static feature set and only security updates, and Office 2019 for Mac getting the full code base used in Office 2019 for Windows 64-bit versions.

Which is a really long way to say that now the code base for Microsoft Office is the same for Windows, Mac, iPhone, iPod, iPad, and Google Android.

Please understand that each different platform requires customizations. There will always be feature differences based on platform. Not every feature will be on every platform.

Now back to Latex. I encourage you to download that free add-in. You hook it up by going to PowerPoint for Mac's Tools menu and choosing PowerPoint Add-ins, click the + sign, and then choose the file you downloaded. I was able to follow the instructions on the download page and everything seemed to work as described. Be sure the blinking cursor is in a text box, not a text layout box when you use the add-in.

They are different programs for different intended uses. So they have different capabilities.