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Dennis Austin, developer of PowerPoint, has died

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Re: Dennis Austin, developer of PowerPoint, has died

#161

Post by m_mueller »

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.

For exactly this reason we use it even to create Factsheets and other printable reports. Using selection pane the objects in the template can be named. We then replace the dummy content in an AWS lambda running python-pptx using these references. PowerPoints‘ charts and tables are quite powerful overall. Still not bug-free but way way more stable than Word, and every bug I‘ve seen can be worked around relatively simply.

Re: Dennis Austin, developer of PowerPoint, has died

#162

Post by fifilura »

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…

We successuflly transitioned our finance team from excel to google sheets.

The killer feature was their APIs, where microsoft still sucks.

We could show them that if you put the data in sheets we could mount it from bigquery and process it from there. Or load it from a notebook.

This created a good-enough hybrid solution where spreadsheets could interact with code.

Re: Dennis Austin, developer of PowerPoint, has died

#163

Post by tomjen3 »

no_wizard wrote: post #136
wredue wrote: post #133

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>thought they were unfairly aimed at the software Yeah. I’ll bet that all of the Microsoft office engineers feel this way, and it explains a lot about why the suite is such a bug ridden, shitty performing fucking mess. The only thing keeping the office suite alive at this point is the enormity of the task to disrupt it.

I surmise that Google workspace has managed to supplant it in a very real ways. For the last 3 places I’ve worked everything is done in Google Workspace. The only thing that Microsoft has a hold over is with Excel, that’s all anyone used from MS

Can you add your own styles to Google docs? Does it have support for templates yet?

Re: Dennis Austin, developer of PowerPoint, has died

#164

Post by tomjen3 »

blululu wrote: post #51
WanderPanda wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As a tech weirdo I still think PPTs are the best way to convey concepts. You can mix bullet points with images and video and have everything be progressively revealed exactly when you explain it. I can‘t even think of an alternative to this other than adhoc whiteboard drawings which can‘t match PPTs on any axis except if you‘re just (collaboratively) developing an idea/concept

Video is usually more effective for asynchronous presentations. Powerpoint is great for spoken presentations where everyone is in the same room. But they generally suck as summary reports. For thinking and analysis word docs are superior. For asynchronous presentation video is superior. Video allows you to control the timing and framing in a way that a slide deck cannot. The main downside to videos is that they are h…

You do know that you can just record your PowerPoint slide with all the spoken world and mouse movement and timing and slide transitions and whatever else, right?

Re: Dennis Austin, developer of PowerPoint, has died

#165

Post by hermitcrab »

madphilosopher wrote: post #158
hermitcrab wrote: post #123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 comput…

If you sell B2C software you are going to end up with customers with a very wide range of computer skills, from professional IT person to someone who can barely find the computer 'on' button. You just have to deal with it.

See also: https://successfulsoftware.net/2010/08/24/10-things-non-tech...

Re: Dennis Austin, developer of PowerPoint, has died

#166

Post by F-W-M »

twobitshifter wrote: post #156
lol768 wrote: post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Wouldn't it be optimal to have read, understood and thought about it before the meeting? Although this probably never happens, except maybe if you go full async and request a thoughtful response from everybody before a meeting might happen.

Re: Dennis Austin, developer of PowerPoint, has died

#167

Post by astrange »

sshah1983 wrote: post #120

I’ll never forget the grade 9 science class Powerpoint presentation I did in 1998. I had each letter of every headline flying in one by one with a laser sound (pew pew pew). That was my first moment of magic with Powerpoint.

If you used WordArt in your titles, that was an intern project by Scott Forstall who later created iOS.

Re: Dennis Austin, developer of PowerPoint, has died

#168

Post by seabass-labrax »

netcoyote wrote: post #122
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.

If there's a meeting and most, but not all, of the folks read the document, then there's the potential they'll have to wait while the others read the document. To avoid that eventuality, the convention is that no one reads the document until the meeting, and then there's no wasted time. source: worked at Amazon and was told this by my boss

That's a pretty good idea, because reading the preparatory material for a decision is almost always valuable but often not explicitly valued. An employee might think they could be 'doing something better' with the time, but even the meekest worker can confidentially feel justified in reading a document if it has scheduled time in the published agenda. This levels the playing field between the overburdened and the lazy on one side and the well-prepared on the other.

From a personal point of view, however, I instinctively dislike the idea: trying to process and evaluate material in public is stressful, chiefly because it is so often in my experience presented in bad faith. The slightest expression of positivity is immediately twisted into unwavering enthusiasm and complete consent, and a hint of misunderstanding is used as justification to discard any further criticism! You have to really trust your colleagues to allow yourself to learn, be confused and risk making mistakes in their company. But if the workplace really does have that non-competitive culture, it is surely the most efficient way of conducting meetings, possibly the best combination of written preparation and live collaboration.

Re: Dennis Austin, developer of PowerPoint, has died

#169

Post by nikau »

irrational wrote: post #137
no_wizard wrote: post #136

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I surmise that Google workspace has managed to supplant it in a very real ways. For the last 3 places I’ve worked everything is done in Google Workspace. The only thing that Microsoft has a hold over is with Excel, that’s all anyone used from MS

At my work (Fortune 100 company), it is Excel and Outlook. I’m not certain why the powers that be settled on outlook.

Outlook is very good when coupled with exchange.

Microsoft are doing their best to alienate their established userbase however, the next versions are just going to be the garbage webmail version wrapped as an app.

Re: Dennis Austin, developer of PowerPoint, has died

#170

Post by zhenyakovalyov »

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.

ha, i have been on the receiving end of such mockups, quite unfortunately (or sometimes excel).

just learn figma common courtesy to your colleagues ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

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