Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Dennis Austin, developer of PowerPoint, has died

washingtonpost.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

151–160 of 180 posts

Re: Dennis Austin, developer of PowerPoint, has died

#151

Post by SoftTalker »

analog31 wrote: post #104
Maro wrote: post #39

I work in a Corporate where we have lots of "strategy" teams and PPTs flying around. What I learned is that PPT are more than a presentation format in this culture, they are a signaling tool: • something that is "just" an email, or "just" something somebody said in a meeting doesn't carry much weight in Corporates • .. but if you put it in a PPT with some graphics, it signals you've thought about it, and probably had…

I think it's as simple as, if you put it in a PPT, you can rest assured that it will be readable and usable by the recipient, which includes passing them along to other people, presenting it, using the slides in other presentations, and so forth. If you choose some "weird" format, then the burden is on you when someone can't use it for some reason.

PPT is the least likely format I’d be able to read. I’d open it in LibreOffice but its handling of PPT is quite poor.

PDF is what I see used when the sender is aware that not all the recipients are using Windows

Re: Dennis Austin, developer of PowerPoint, has died

#152

Post by bradrn »

bsder wrote: post #150
srazzaque wrote: post #146

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yep, I've long conjectured that Excel is what sells MS office. Every other product in the Office suite, including PowerPoint, has very viable alternatives. Excel has a 100% a strong-hold in most finance departments. I've worked with many finance professionals who's very first instinct for any type of work is to open Excel. When interacting with any data outside of Excel, they'll demand a way to get it into Excel.

Excel rules the roost because it is the GUI to manipulate tabular data. To be honest: Is there an alternative? I've been looking for a spreadsheet so that I can "drive spreadsheet from Python" rather than the usual "drive Python from spreadsheet". As far as I can tell, that doesn't exist. There are read-only variants to analyzed tabular data, but there seem to be none that allow me to do lots of editing in a visual w…

> I've been looking for a spreadsheet so that I can "drive spreadsheet from Python" rather than the usual "drive Python from spreadsheet".

You might find Mito [https://www.trymito.io/] interesting. I haven’t really used it myself, but it sounds like what you’re looking for.

Re: Dennis Austin, developer of PowerPoint, has died

#153

Post by srazzaque »

bsder wrote: post #150
srazzaque wrote: post #146

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yep, I've long conjectured that Excel is what sells MS office. Every other product in the Office suite, including PowerPoint, has very viable alternatives. Excel has a 100% a strong-hold in most finance departments. I've worked with many finance professionals who's very first instinct for any type of work is to open Excel. When interacting with any data outside of Excel, they'll demand a way to get it into Excel.

Excel rules the roost because it is the GUI to manipulate tabular data. To be honest: Is there an alternative? I've been looking for a spreadsheet so that I can "drive spreadsheet from Python" rather than the usual "drive Python from spreadsheet". As far as I can tell, that doesn't exist. There are read-only variants to analyzed tabular data, but there seem to be none that allow me to do lots of editing in a visual w…

To be clear: I'm not bashing Excel. Agree that there isn't a viable alternative for explorative table manipulation, and the experience of "think/change/see-results" is second to none. I myself use it for low-stakes tasks such as personal budgeting and quick analysis to validate my assumptions on tabular data.

Key word there is low-stakes. I think Excel gets a lot of heat because it's often found used in contexts where it's wholly inappropriate to use (eg driving critical production decisions from SalesAnalysis_JimVersion_v1.8_FINAL.xlsx). That's not really Excel's fault.

Re: Dennis Austin, developer of PowerPoint, has died

#154

Post by wholinator2 »

placesalt wrote: post #142
globalise83 wrote: post #121

Apart from being useful for presentations, Powerpoint is still my go-to for mockups - screw Figma, I can achieve 80% of the result in 20% of the time.

The geometry available and the frankly very subtly good alignment-snapping that it has makes it very useful. Posters, ERDs, I'm sure there are other applications too.

I had to make an academic poster in PowerPoint and it was the single worst experience of my academic career. The program just didn't work. I got a ways into it, saved and closed my work, and opened it the next day. Upon opening, no longer could i zoom or scroll or really do anything without the view freezing. I could see the scrollwheel on the side moving but nothing on screen would change. It would stay permanently in this state until i closed it out or (thank God) entered and exited presentation mode, which took seconds to load every time.

Eventually it's crass refusal to do anything even mildly useful taught me the exact set of eggshells to walk on to have a somewhat usable program but the damn thing just wouldn't work. I tried everything, including uninstalling and reinstalling the entire office suite. Nothing changed. My poster was not complicated and my laptop was school issued and more than capable of running a single PowerPoint slide.

I know this is a post of a man's passing. The PowerPoint he built worked. I remember PowerPoint as a usable and fun slide making tool that was usually the highlight of relatively tedious school projects. To see the bug ridden landfill of "BI" "features" it is now is sad. I genuinely spent a day trying to download an old version that wasn't running 3 "ai" processes in the background. It was a simply disgusting experience and i will never use it again.

Re: Dennis Austin, developer of PowerPoint, has died

#155

Post by msteffen »

bsder wrote: post #150
srazzaque wrote: post #146

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yep, I've long conjectured that Excel is what sells MS office. Every other product in the Office suite, including PowerPoint, has very viable alternatives. Excel has a 100% a strong-hold in most finance departments. I've worked with many finance professionals who's very first instinct for any type of work is to open Excel. When interacting with any data outside of Excel, they'll demand a way to get it into Excel.

Excel rules the roost because it is the GUI to manipulate tabular data. To be honest: Is there an alternative? I've been looking for a spreadsheet so that I can "drive spreadsheet from Python" rather than the usual "drive Python from spreadsheet". As far as I can tell, that doesn't exist. There are read-only variants to analyzed tabular data, but there seem to be none that allow me to do lots of editing in a visual w…

It’s JS rather than Python, but Google Apps Script is quite useful for this, IME.

I once wrote a small app to add up all shared expenses among a group of roommates and calculate how much each owed the others. It pulled together rent (recurring), various utilities (from my gmail) and one-off shared expenses (e.g. toilet paper) from a Google form/spreadsheet, added in any money owed from the prior month and generated a nice report, in what ended up being 100-200 lines of code after a few years of living together.

Re: Dennis Austin, developer of PowerPoint, has died

#156

Post by twobitshifter »

lol768 wrote: post #102
F-W-M wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why do meetings start with dedicated reading time? Did people always come unprepared? How can I imagine this? Is it like: "Hey folks, thanks for showing up. This is the document we'll be discussing in 20min. Please read it now?". I don't think it's bad. I like written, long form content. It just is very far from what I know.

I've asked some friends at Amazon this and never quite got a satisfactory answer. It feels really disrespectful to waste my time, when I've bothered reading the preparatory material, because X number of other attendees haven't. And, presumably, for Amazon to do this for every single meeting, it must have been commonplace for folks to not manage their time effectively to get prepared for the meetings they attend? Quit…

The optimal is for everyone not to do the reading, there’s time for it in the meeting. And in terms of time management, managers can be in back to back meetings for a large portion of the day and this provides focus time to not just wing it.

Re: Dennis Austin, developer of PowerPoint, has died

#157

Post by canucker2016 »

bsder wrote: post #150
srazzaque wrote: post #146

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yep, I've long conjectured that Excel is what sells MS office. Every other product in the Office suite, including PowerPoint, has very viable alternatives. Excel has a 100% a strong-hold in most finance departments. I've worked with many finance professionals who's very first instinct for any type of work is to open Excel. When interacting with any data outside of Excel, they'll demand a way to get it into Excel.

Excel rules the roost because it is the GUI to manipulate tabular data. To be honest: Is there an alternative? I've been looking for a spreadsheet so that I can "drive spreadsheet from Python" rather than the usual "drive Python from spreadsheet". As far as I can tell, that doesn't exist. There are read-only variants to analyzed tabular data, but there seem to be none that allow me to do lots of editing in a visual w…

They just announced this, but it runs python in an azure container - not sure how it hooks into excel unless excel is also running in the cloud, but a lot of people would want to run it locally instead.

See https://techcommunity.microsoft.com/t5/microsoft-365-blog/in...

Re: Dennis Austin, developer of PowerPoint, has died

#158

Post by madphilosopher »

hermitcrab wrote: post #123
simonh wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You should see his marriage proposal. Joking aside, I worked for a big corporation once where our project manager's emails were literally blank, with the actual message in an attached powerpoint.

Some people don't understand that you can attach just an image file to an email. I often get Word attachments containing a single image.

If you ran a carpentry shop, you wouldn't retain employees who lacked a basic understanding of their woodworking tools and how to use them. Yet we tolerate this of "information workers" the world over. Why is that? Is it because the image got to you after all, so it doesn't really matter how inefficient the process was?

I am genuinely curious. But then again, I ask the question as a computer enthusiast using a computer to talk to other computer enthusiasts about computers.

Re: Dennis Austin, developer of PowerPoint, has died

#159

Post by pcchristie »

hermitcrab wrote: post #123
simonh wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You should see his marriage proposal. Joking aside, I worked for a big corporation once where our project manager's emails were literally blank, with the actual message in an attached powerpoint.

Some people don't understand that you can attach just an image file to an email. I often get Word attachments containing a single image.

I once had a client become nervous about sending me a screenshot of (slightly) sensitive data. Despite explaining the NDAs, I could only get her to send a redacted version, which was fine given none of the sensitive parts of data was relevant to what I wanted to know. She took a screenshot, pasted the screenshot in to an XLSX, and put a "Shape" over the top of the part of the screenshot that she wanted to redact. Then sent me the XLSX in an email.

Tangential to your comment but it reminded me.

Re: Dennis Austin, developer of PowerPoint, has died

#160

Post by doctor_eval »

simonh wrote: post #21
tedchs wrote: post #20

I hope his funeral has a slide presentation with some amazing animations and sound effects! :)

You should see his marriage proposal. Joking aside, I worked for a big corporation once where our project manager's emails were literally blank, with the actual message in an attached powerpoint.

OMG I had a manager do this... I asked him to email me a bug report and he sent me a PPT.

Honestly he could have written a 2-line email. He probably thought he was giving me Important Information. But as I got to know the guy I realised he was just an idiot.

Post reply on HN