11–20 of 261 posts
Even after all its feature and popularity I find it extremely hard to use and often end up wasting hours trying to create a simple graphic. As a last resort I always end up booting Windows just to use Photoshop to do the same. I have been trying to move away from Windows to linux and so far I'm super happy with everything. But Photoshop is the only reason I have to keep Windows alive (or atleast use wine)
Microsoft Powerpoint (and to a lesser extent Word). I lost count of the number of days I spent trying to make my presentations and documents look good (which for me means pixel perfect). To be clear, this isn’t a failing of the software per se. PowerPoint is powerful and lets you do a lot of stuff, but I took desktop publishing lessons in high school, and I’m a bit obsessive to start with. I just have to have everyth…
If your audience doesn't need pixel perfect, don't do it. In my experience, the speed of adapting a PP presentation is more important than it's "beauty" by some abstract definition.
Aesthetics help to be taken seriously. But are you delivering the content or the design?
Program that wasted me 100 hours: using LaTeX to make the poster for said scientific paper.
LaTeX is great for when you need to focus on your content and don't have much time to spend on the presentation. However, once the presentation is the entire point, LaTeX is not the right tool.
Well, except if you like boring posters.
Microsoft Powerpoint (and to a lesser extent Word). I lost count of the number of days I spent trying to make my presentations and documents look good (which for me means pixel perfect). To be clear, this isn’t a failing of the software per se. PowerPoint is powerful and lets you do a lot of stuff, but I took desktop publishing lessons in high school, and I’m a bit obsessive to start with. I just have to have everyth…
Everytime I can go away with a very simple presentation I do it, but for some reason we are partly judged on powerpoint appearance. I once did an animated background for a presentation as a joke, and was praised by everyone for it instead of my team being blamed for doing useless things on work time.
And I don't really see an alternative. It's more of a cultural issue.
I have a hard time using word, and corporate templates used to be good and complete but aren't anymore. Fortunately we usually have competent secretaries who do the formatting and some editing work.
For less official work I use markdown or latex most of the time.
Microsoft Windows. I lose 10-20 minutes 1-5x a day just logging in to Windows in the NHS...
I imagine if one were to add up all the estimated time wasted using that system and compare it to writing a client agnostic one from scratch it would probably turn out to be a massive saving.
Jira and confluence
Every program in the Microsoft Office suite.
Minecraft
I apologize for saying this in advance but I'd have to say for me it's GIMP. Even after all its feature and popularity I find it extremely hard to use and often end up wasting hours trying to create a simple graphic. As a last resort I always end up booting Windows just to use Photoshop to do the same. I have been trying to move away from Windows to linux and so far I'm super happy with everything. But Photoshop is t…
