I remember being a bit taken aback when a colleague of mine at a large company where design is a pretty big deal showed me some really good wireframes and told me that he made them in PowerPoint. It’s actually quite a good tool for wireframing

I had to make an academic poster in PowerPoint and it was the single worst experience of my academic career. The program just didn't work. I got a ways into it, saved and closed my work, and opened it the next day. Upon opening, no longer could i zoom or scroll or really do anything without the view freezing. I could see the scrollwheel on the side moving but nothing on screen would change. It would stay permanently in this state until i closed it out or (thank God) entered and exited presentation mode, which took seconds to load every time.

Eventually it's crass refusal to do anything even mildly useful taught me the exact set of eggshells to walk on to have a somewhat usable program but the damn thing just wouldn't work. I tried everything, including uninstalling and reinstalling the entire office suite. Nothing changed. My poster was not complicated and my laptop was school issued and more than capable of running a single PowerPoint slide.

I know this is a post of a man's passing. The PowerPoint he built worked. I remember PowerPoint as a usable and fun slide making tool that was usually the highlight of relatively tedious school projects. To see the bug ridden landfill of "BI" "features" it is now is sad. I genuinely spent a day trying to download an old version that wasn't running 3 "ai" processes in the background. It was a simply disgusting experience and i will never use it again.

For exactly this reason we use it even to create Factsheets and other printable reports. Using selection pane the objects in the template can be named. We then replace the dummy content in an AWS lambda running python-pptx using these references. PowerPoints‘ charts and tables are quite powerful overall. Still not bug-free but way way more stable than Word, and every bug I‘ve seen can be worked around relatively simply.