The colour rendering bug in Microsoft PowerPoint 2011 for Mac is highly annoying. Here is fiddly a trick to get around it. You basically need to goal-seek the text colour into something you like.
  1. Pick a colour you like, draw a shape and fill it with the colour
  2. Write some text in a big bold font and set it to the same colour: PowerPoint will render it incorrectly
  3. Here is the fiddly part: repeat steps 1-3 until you are happy with the TEXT COLOUR.
  4. Now, use the Apple colour picker to strip the colour of the text
Save your colour template with 1 accent colour for text, and one accent colour for shapes. In your drop down menu they will look different, on screen they will look the same.


Note 1: I tested the PowerPoint RGB colours as well in Photoshop and Illustrator, and it turns out that PowerPoint renders the shape colours incorrectly, the text is correct.

Note 2: There is a more analytical way to get your desired colour than simply trial and error. You can analyse the RGB codes of the background colour and the text colour. So, set the shape colour to something that you would like. Write down the RGB codes. Colour the text with that colour, and pick its colour with the colour picker. Write down the text RGB codes. Analyse the difference between the two colours and create a third colour by adding/subtracting the R, G, and B differences between the colours. This will be your text colour that renders the same as the desired shape colour. It all sounds more complicated than it is.

Question for you guys, can someone report back how this is rendered on a Windows machine?

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