Learning a little bit of mermaid is perhaps the highest ROI learning activity I've done in years. Easier, quicker communication about technical ideas - for me it's been a game changer that has made it much easier to get buy in on ideas.
This app may not have all the diagramming syntax Mermaid or sequencediagram.org has, but should be enough for 99% cases.
Mermaid removes most of personal touches and/or design choices. Which makes all diagrams a lot more uniform (which is most of the time a good thing in my book).
- no diffs
- no line attributions
- no easy versioning
- no discussions about whether something should be pushed 10 px to the right
- no reshuffling a whole diagram after you've changed something - no need to use a shitty office 365 web app (sluggish, slow to load, trusting 10 CDNs)
- ppt is not a graph tool, have fun moving things around after creating a diagram
- no need to rely on proprietary software
- no need to log in anywhere
- no costs
Agree with others that Mermaid and PlantUML are very useful, but sometimes you need high degrees of visual customization that they don’t give.
I agree with that and it is the reason I have not yet adopted using Mermaid more.
Would be nice to have Mermaid output some form of standard XML describing the graph and then being able to edit it with a graph editing tool.
I often use yEd for making diagrams, but it is not free/libre software. Still the most capable graph editor I know. It stores graphs as XML "graphml", which is structured data of course. Now if we could have a standard format for graphs and visual attributes of graphs like graphml (maybe even graphml, if it is an open standard?) to export to, when using Mermaid, that would be awesome.
Powerpoint doesn't really cover those things.