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Comment by laurentl | Hacker News Reader

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 everything lined up and evenly spaced and just so. Which PowerPoint lets you do easily enough, but then you need to add another box to your diagram... and resize and reposition everything more or less manually.

Similar story for Word, which almost lets you do professional(ish) documents once you know where all the typesetting options are hidden. I’ve given up on Word for technical documents and now use Markdown + pandoc to convert to Latex and then pdf.

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At my current company, Powerpoint is used as the main medium for communication and reporting. Powerpoint slide decks are even considered some form of documentation by many, even though they are not really suited for that: Bullet points instead of coherent prose and explanations, ambiguity on the audience of the presentation (internal vs customer), general clunkiness of a ppt files. For many projects, documentation is just a shared directory with a number of powerpoint files from various stages of the project. I hate it and I want to change it, but I am still new to the organization and this behavior is deeply ingrained.

Besides that, Powerpoint is pretty good if you actually want to do a presentation.

On the flip side, I've noticed PowerPoint can bring immense efficiency gains to environments where the standard is to write to a detailed report for every little thing. You don't need a detailed user guide of 20 pages of text if a few ppt do the same job.

So do you have any go to tips or shortcut (keys) that are your favorite?

Same experience here. On PowerPoint, when there is repetitive work (weey presentation etc) i try to get a correct template, but most of the time I spend too much time on it, it's just a pain, and the corporate templates are horrible.

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.

You do presentations for your audience. Adjust the contents, adjust the style.

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?

TBH doing it all in LaTeX you end up down the same rabbit hole, looking for the One True Way to do this and that, at least for me. I do enjoy it a lot as it teaches me about typesetting internals, but it's not faster with one or the other technology.

Because the bottleneck is not the tool, but rather your decision making process.

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