In my opinion it's way better to have things all in one program. The clumsiness of needing to open up a heavyweight program like Powerpoint to then copy and paste the figure somehow into your document every time you revise is very annoying to me. Plus it's less portable.
This is why Microsoft invented OLE many decades ago. Admittedly it was a clunky, heavy and proprietary solution just like most other tech out of that company.
