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Dennis Austin, developer of PowerPoint, has died

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Re: Dennis Austin, developer of PowerPoint, has died

#171

Post by qubex »

srazzaque wrote: post #146
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

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.

I’m a very happy (and I believe competent) Apple Numbers user. The only thing I miss from Excel is recursive evaluation (which is necessary for evaluating certain financial models).

Re: Dennis Austin, developer of PowerPoint, has died

#172

Post by paradox460 »

msteffen wrote: post #155
bsder wrote: post #150

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Isn't officescript much the same thing?

Re: Dennis Austin, developer of PowerPoint, has died

#173

Post by twobitshifter »

F-W-M wrote: post #166
twobitshifter wrote: post #156

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Right I shouldn’t have said optimal, it’s the Nash equilibrium though.

Re: Dennis Austin, developer of PowerPoint, has died

#174

Post by paradox460 »

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.

When I "worked" at a public access TV channel, we used a big PowerPoint deck for most of the unprogrammed roll. It was pretty simple too. A G4 cube would just have a ppt on loop, and output it's video into the switcher. When you needed to update the roll, you just replaced the file over the network, and reloaded the application. You were supposed to do this when the switcher was showing some other program, but occasionally someone would forget, and a video of the OS X 10.1 desktop would go out on the air.

Apparently they used hypercard before PowerPoint, but when Apple pulled the plug, they had to move over

Re: Dennis Austin, developer of PowerPoint, has died

#176

Post by TRiG_Ireland »

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.

As a web developer, we sometimes got bug reports submitted that way. I think some people take a screenshot and paste it into Word, and don't know how to save it as an image.

Re: Dennis Austin, developer of PowerPoint, has died

#177

Post by PhasmaFelis »

mcny wrote: post #139
irrational wrote: post #137

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

I worked at a company that used IBM's Lotus for six months. Outlook was no longer the worst for me.

I worked at a place that used Lotus Notes in the late '00s. Used to say that, when Notes launched in 1989, it was 10 years ahead of its time; and even today it's still 10 years ahead of 1989.

Re: Dennis Austin, developer of PowerPoint, has died

#179

Post by aswanson »

psunavy03 wrote: post #87
aswanson wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Jesus Christ. This outdoes the hilarity/horror I heard when someone got contracted to implement a battle management system in Microsoft Office.

As a former staff officer . . . whaaaa???

I wish I could share the details. Honest to God.

Re: Dennis Austin, developer of PowerPoint, has died

#180

Post by p5a0u9l »

F-W-M wrote: post #98
p5a0u9l wrote: post #48

One aspect of Amazon culture I’ve enjoyed is that meetings are document driven, and PPTs are rare, even non existent. Meetings start with dedicated reading time. It feels like PPT engendered this false sense of communication by making it easier to bullet-ize and visualize. PPT in practice lowers the critical thinking required of presenters and presentees.

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.

People are busy and often times will be aware of the broad strokes of the topic at hand, but not necessarily the latest details. A well written narrative will bring everyone back to the salient choices.
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