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nchase

Excel. There are many good Powerpoint replacements, and few competent Excel ones.

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What I usually see are poor attempts to replace Powerpoint, usually with coding in JavaScript or basic HTML features.

As usual, most people attempting to replace Office don't get the features that are actually available.

Apple Keynote is good though.

Yes, fully agree, that is however also most likely not on the list of Powerpoint haters.

I argue there are plenty of competent Excel alternatives - you need only look at Excel’s embarrasingly long UserVoice page to see the myriad of small little bugs and missing functionality that make it extremely painful to use, but will never be fixed because it breaks backwards-compatibility or just because “reasons”.

Amongst my personal peeves are: inability to do non-integral scrolling; no multi-statement functions or inline-variables; still no sane and consistent CSV support; and still no TryParseDateExact and TryParseCurrency functions - using Excel when you want to use ISO 8601 consistently is painful.

https://excel.uservoice.com/

Complaints show the opposite of what you think it does. People are using it despite the flaws because it is irreplaceable.

There are the programming languages everyone complains about, and the ones that nobody uses.

Most popular does not equate best quality. It means just exactly what it states: most popular (within a target audience). All too often, something less popular is better in one way or another but does not gain traction. For example, because if network effect or because of monopoly abuse.

FWIW, I can do everything I need with LibreOffice. It even runs stable on my Mac. However, on Citrix, my employer does not have LibreOffice, so I gotta resort to MS Office. I gotta work with the tool which is tge default, my choice of preference be damned. Which is rather standard. And students learn to use MS Office because if massive discounts. Bail 'em in when young, and you get lifetime customer. How I ended up staying with my bank post student years.

Capitalism is an imperfect fitness algorithm, but it is pretty damn good

> I argue there are plenty of competent Excel alternatives

Which are they? Libreoffice calc has a lot of jagged edges, google sheets is very slow on even modest sheets.

Excel recently got variables with LET and functions with LAMBDA

I’d argue that Powerpoint has negative value overall. But I suppose technically Microsoft still gets positive money for it.

Slide presentation software in general - or PowerPoint specifically?

I think PowerPoint has simultaneously been the best - and the worst - thing to happen to academia in the past 100+ years, and PP has only been out with good MM projectors for only the past 20 years - it has tremendous value. It’s only a bad thing when people aren’t using it correctly - though I appreciate that good software should be difficult to use incorrectly.

(okay, next worst thing after Blackboard).

Slide presentation software in general. It is perhaps OK to present simple subjects to a crowd with the aid of visuals such as slides, but the more complex the subject is the more the slides will impede understanding. Think of the slides used to present technical data about foam hitting the Space Shuttle to managers at NASA just after the launch of Columbia. They were garbage in several ways, but chiefly because they had only nested bulleted lists rather than just paragraphs and sentences.

https://www.edwardtufte.com/bboard/q-and-a-fetch-msg?msg_id=...

It is possible to lie using ordinary sentences and paragraphs, but slides pile on even more ways to deceive. They encourage you to break up the flow of information into optimistic headlines and soundbites followed by fine print that is easily ignored.

Slide decks are humanity’s most dangerous invention. We should teach our enemies about slide decks. When we meet aggressive aliens, we can sell them Powerpoint to slow them down. Too bad our own military already uses it; I’ve read that all of our high–level military planning is done by Powerpoint presentations.

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