- Research Poster Session
Every now and then I get someone who wants a poster template for Microsoft Word. Here are the reasons I give them that Word is not such a good program for designing a poster:
1. Word is made for producing documents, and forces margins on the sides, above, and below whatever you type. You really don’t want a foot of white space around your poster, but that’s what a Microsoft Word poster would get.
2. Word will drive you nuts because it wants to fit everything into paragraphs of text. Try moving a picture to the bottom right hand corner of a page, it pops back to wherever Word thinks it should go! PowerPoint lets you put things anywhere you want on the page.
3. If you have Word, you probably have PowerPoint. We’ve got great templates in PowerPoint that you can download for free. If you don’t have PowerPoint, try using Open Office, which you can also download for free. It will open our PowerPoint templates, which are in ppt file format.
4. Maximum page size in Word is 22″ in either dimension, for PowerPoint it’s 56″. The less we scale the page, the better for print quality, so especially for large size posters Microsoft poster templates should be in PowerPoint!
postersession 
I think that you are absolutely right about about the distinction between Word and Powerpoint. It is much easier to get all the grafic elements placed the right place in PowerPoint.
Iøm always use Powerpoint to produce both posters, but also reports with charts and tables from excel, since the same challenge with margins, paragraphs exits here. I always copy all of my content to powerpoint in pictures format that is the easiest way to work with in powerpoint.