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Figma Slides

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Re: Figma Slides

#91

Post by gcanyon »

alwillis wrote: post #85
yoz wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wow, I didn't know about that Keynote feature, that's amazing. it really shows the extent to which they care about visual design as an end result. I desperately wish Apple's office apps got more development. They have the potential to be world-beating (especially Numbers) but Apple seems content to just update a couple of minor features a year and leave it at that.

> They have the potential to be world-beating (especially Numbers) Don't sleep on Numbers. It doesn't get a lot of attention but it can do some nice things in a much less bloated interface than Excel. It's had regular expressions for a while for example, while Excel is just getting them. I love being able to put multiple spreadsheets on a page and arrange them in whatever way you want. Reminds me of Lotus Improv [1]…

> put multiple spreadsheets on a page

I’ve been hot for this feature since the Improv days — I browbeat the AppleWorks people to support it better, and when a bunch of them split off to build I made sure they knew this was a key feature.

Ragtime still supports it as far as I know. https://www.ragtime.de/start.html?lang_id=en

Re: Figma Slides

#92

Post by chris37879 »

zeroonetwothree wrote: post #80
fishtoaster wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Agreed. I've given a few conference talks and found judicious animations super helpful when I'm presenting code. Showing 10 lines of code on a screen at once is a surefire way to have the audience either not read/understand it or to read it, but ignore what I'm saying. So I like to build up a slide full of code by starting with a couple line (eg the function definition), then adding a few more, then a few more, and t…

It’s not ideal to have slides that only work if everyone is paying attention at all times. This animation should not be used to impart information. You can highlight changes in other ways.

I'd be curious to hear how you'd do the execution flow like they mention? Just use multiple sequential slides?

Re: Figma Slides

#93

Post by fratlas »

chatmasta wrote: post #26

Funny, I was just wondering today why Google doesn’t have an infinite canvas product. All I want is Google Slides with an infinite canvas. Products like Figma, Miro, and Excalidraw are all great, but they’re not integrated into Google Workspace like Docs/Slides. I like comments, tagging users, auto-completing links to other docs with their title, etc.

Try Canva whiteboards. You can embed an inf canvas into slides

Re: Figma Slides

#94

Post by blt »

timr wrote: post #45
yoz wrote: post #36

At my previous job we used Google Slides, and I rapidly came to hate it. Here's why Figma Slides has me excited: - I use animation a lot, for many reasons, such as keeping audience focus on parts of the slide and visually explaining information changes and multi-step processes. It's particularly helpful for video. Figma already has much better tools for this; Google's are not particularly powerful and buggy as hell.…

All of the things you mentioned (save maybe layer lists) are why I fell in love with Keynote, and wish I could use it for all presentations. Sadly, 99% of my time is spent in Google slides, which is like banging rocks together. Keynote's ability to do things like introspect into postscript/vector objects and align on lines within the object is one of those things that makes you re-evaluate how software should work. I…

I love Keynote, but after spending a lot of time in LaTeX Beamer when almost anything can be changed temporally within a slide using overlays, Keynote has frustrating limits. For example, you can't animate changing the background color of a table cell.

Also, its tools for editing embedded videos are quite less capable than PowerPoint's.

Not sure if PowerPoint can do the table cell thing. But overall, I still feel the perfect slide making software doesn't exist yet.

Re: Figma Slides

#95

Post by diegof79 »

patchorang wrote: post #21

Designers are pretty good at siloing themselves. I worry this may further silo them as the rest of the business will continue to use PPT. Designers frequently express frustration about "not having a seat at the table." It's going to be tough to influence the business when using a different tool than everyone else. Edit: PPT or Google Slides* My point was more about using the tool that the rest of the business is usin…

The goal is to use the best tool to solve a problem. But it is tricky when you don’t know better and everyone around you follows the herd for different reasons.

Most presentation tools are poorly designed.

For example, many cognitive studies support the idea that the same brain channel handles text and speech. If you try to read and listen to different things, you can’t simultaneously pay full attention to both. Yet most presentation software encourages using bullet points, which are used extensively in business presentations.

Superfluous animation is distracting, yet presentation software animation capabilities are redundant and don’t have basic things like having a timeline with keyframes.

Outlining and notes are handy during the ideation phase of a presentation, yet outlining features are terrible.

Google Slides is extremely painful to work with. Taking a template and filling in the blanks with bullet points is okay, but even formatting a text box right is painful. PPT is better, but it has the typical MS problem: feature bloat, where the most valuable things are half-baked. Keynote is one of the best. However, its sharing editing capabilities are between buggy and nonexistent.

By contrast, Figma's visual editing capabilities are orders of magnitude better: components and auto-layout help you work faster with a tool abstraction that is much better than the crappy master slides.

So, if you work the whole day with Figma and are productive with it… why inflect yourself the pain of using PPT/Google Slides for your presentation? You will be the one presenting. (Note: many times, I used Google Slides for those shared presentations, which I suffer… but if its my presentation I prefer Keynote or Figma depending on the case)

Re: Figma Slides

#96

Post by aikinai »

mdorazio wrote: post #37
pwthornton wrote: post #31

All of our serious decks are produced in Figma. Slides and PowerPoint can't make a good enough looking presentation. Internal stuff, quick stuff to show clients, whatever, use Slides, but for trying to win new accounts, we use Figma.

Counterpoint: I have never encountered a “designer deck” that I couldn’t recreate in PowerPoint. Most people just really suck at PowerPoint / Slides and, to be fair, the functionality to make things look good is often unintuitive. Just as a random example, most people don’t know that shapes in PowerPoint are full vector objects with editable Bézier curves and Boolean tools available.

PowerPoint I believe you (or at least don’t know enough myself to argue). But for Slides, there’s no way. How, for example, would you put an outline around text?

Re: Figma Slides

#97

Post by aikinai »

mattegan wrote: post #83
toddmorey wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah it's like slide software was bifurcated: either you can actually collaborate (google) or make quality slides (keynote). Finally some hope: Figma actually does both of those things really well. I'm also excited by what you can potentially do programmatically in Figma. Has anyone ever tried using the google slides API? It’s one of those APIs where you sort of wonder if you are the only actual user or if other peop…

I cannot stand the lack of SVG support in Google slides. When I worked on the hardware team there I hated that I had to import my polished vector block diagrams into slides as PNGs. There was a 10+ year old bug thread with 100s of +1s for SVG support in Docs. IIRC the reasoning behind the delay was security concerns - seemed like a bit of a cop out, but what do I know?

There’s still one painful workaround to get SVGs into Google Slides! I actually posted it in that bug thread at Google and then ended up with people attacking me like I was on the team and claiming the workaround is good enough. Anyway, here’s how to do it:

Download Inkscape and then convert your SVG to EMF (some PowerPoint vector format I think).

/Applications/Inkscape.app/Contents/MacOS/inkscape file.svg --export-filename=file.emf

Upload the EMF file to Google Drive with content type “application/x-msmetafile”.

rclone copyto --http-headers '"Content-Type","application/x-msmetafile"' file.emf gdrive:file.emf

Right-click on the file in Drive and open in Google Drawings (if Google Drawings isn’t an option, you don’t have the right content-type set on the file.

Copy from Google Drawings to Google Slides.

Enjoy your painful-but-at-least-possible vector objects in Google Slides!

Re: Figma Slides

#98

Post by dijit »

lopkeny12ko wrote: post #87
dijit wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Europe (especially germany, or gamedev) is all PPTs. I sold google workspace to my org and Google Slides is what is giving me the most backlash because it is considered woefully inadequate compared to powerpoint. Especially around brand identity tied to fonts.

"brand identity tied to fonts" sounds like more of a problem related to your company culture/ego of the marketing team than a shortcoming of the tool. I guarantee you that if you substituted your company's cherished sans serif font for another sans serif font, no one would notice or care except the designers who have nothing better to occupy their time with.

> "brand identity tied to fonts" sounds like more of a problem related to your company culture/ego of the marketing team than a shortcoming of the tool.

I mean, first, I'm not so egotistical as to claim tacit knowledge of domains that aren't mine. Corp Comms and Marketing deserve to work with good tools, the same as engineers do.

Second, I can't imagine a marketing person coming to me and forcing me to use a different IDE that didn't permit debugging because of their personal preferences.

I would (rightfully) chew them out for being so arrogant to have an opinion on what is useful for my work.

Re: Figma Slides

#99

Post by victor106 »

timr wrote: post #45
yoz wrote: post #36

At my previous job we used Google Slides, and I rapidly came to hate it. Here's why Figma Slides has me excited: - I use animation a lot, for many reasons, such as keeping audience focus on parts of the slide and visually explaining information changes and multi-step processes. It's particularly helpful for video. Figma already has much better tools for this; Google's are not particularly powerful and buggy as hell.…

All of the things you mentioned (save maybe layer lists) are why I fell in love with Keynote, and wish I could use it for all presentations. Sadly, 99% of my time is spent in Google slides, which is like banging rocks together. Keynote's ability to do things like introspect into postscript/vector objects and align on lines within the object is one of those things that makes you re-evaluate how software should work. I…

Agree 1000%

After I struggled with PowerPoint and Google Slides, Keynote was what I was super comfortable with and could very easily express what I wanted to. It’s the first tool I reach out to. I hope Apple keeps this alive for a long time.

Re: Figma Slides

#100

Post by jwells89 »

insane_dreamer wrote: post #82
timr wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

All of the things you mentioned (save maybe layer lists) are why I fell in love with Keynote, and wish I could use it for all presentations. Sadly, 99% of my time is spent in Google slides, which is like banging rocks together. Keynote's ability to do things like introspect into postscript/vector objects and align on lines within the object is one of those things that makes you re-evaluate how software should work. I…

In my experience of many years, not only is Keynote fantastic, but Pages is better than Word and Numbers is better than Excel (though not the extensive Excel ecosystem).

Not too long ago I had to write a short paper in the current version of Word for Mac for a class I was taking and was surprised at how frustrating the experience was, in several ways feeling like stepping back in time a couple decades. Thankfully assignments since have accepted PDFs so using Pages is no problem.
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