Comment by theodorewiles | Hacker News Reader

Comment by theodorewiles | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

Whoever writes the tool that can Actually Make a legitimate microsoft office powerpoint slide from text will make a lot of money.

From what I have seen most of these tools need to do more user research on how powerpoint slides actually look like in practice.

There's a lot of "you're doing it wrong, show don't tell, just keep the basics on the slide" but the people that use powerpoint to make $$$ make incredibly dense powerpoint materials that serve as reference documents, not presentation guides (i.e. they are intended as leave-behind documents that people can read in advance)

Presentations are also quite hard because:

1. It must "compile to" Powerpoint (it must compile to powerpoint because your end users will want to make direct edits and those end users will NOT be comfortable in markdown and in general will be very averse to change) 2. Powerpoint has no layout engine 3. Powerpoint presentations are in fact a beautiful medium in which VISUAL LAYOUT HAS SEMANTIC MEANING (powerpoint is like medieval art where larger is more important)

If anyone wants to help me build an engine that can get an LLM to ACTUALLY make powerpoints please let me know. I am sure this is a lot harder than you think it is.

I think the use case would be limited to a handful of users (slight hyperbole).

The average user is content enough with using plain PowerPoint and won’t bother with Markdown. People using Markdown are more on the “you’re doing it wrong, put the basics on the slide” side.

The people that make nice backgrounds for their talk, sometimes with a word or two, won’t get there with a text based tool either.

People that use LaTeX, markdown or some other text to slides tool are few and far between.

> 1. It must "compile to" Powerpoint

You simple cannot compete with Microsoft on Microsoft's turf. This approach is doomed.

The value in a presentation tool is that it can create a variety of presentations. The future of presentations will be variety (possibly via AI) to convey information in both optimal and creative ways.

Do you have one of these information dense powerpoints as a reference? Is there data visualization embedded in the slides? I don't know anything about this so I'm curious.

Here's one potential example of a moderate complexity slide deck generated by serious professionals : https://media.kalzumeus.com/complex-systems/334925792-Shorti...

That is a PDF copy of the actual pitch deck Deutsche Bank used for a proposed trade to take advantage of the 2008 housing financial crash by "Shorting Home Equity Mezzanine Tranches" (an incredible and lucrative prediction they made back in 2007, when the PDF was authored). The real meat and potatoes starts on page 6, but every page after the disclaimer could be put on screen as a slide in a powerpoint.

Note how nearly every slide is a diagram with title and potentially a caption. Each diagram is annotated with custom annotations explaining the concepts at play, requiring a ton of annotations. There's charts, block diagrams, process workflows, tables, and more. A minority of the pages are text-only with bulleted lists. This is an ultra high value artifact and very little of it would have benefited from a markdown->slides automation. What makes it amazing is the sheer volume and detail of very specific information, only replicable via tremendous elbow grease.

I teach the math behind AI, so my slides are very dense. Not "text heavy", but elaborate - some animations, graphics with arrows pointing to more graphics, 3-4 slides on just explaining what all the symbols in a math equation mean, and a worked example.

I would never be able to design my slides if I used a Markdown to PPT converter.

These are the slide decks that McKinsey and BCG consultants leave behind after a 6 month contract. The deck is the work product that the consulting firm got paid 7 or 8 figures for.

They are typically 60+ pages slides on something like go-to-market strategy or organizational realignment that the C-level at the hiring firm hired them to do and will forward around to his reports and teams to implement.

Each slide is handcrafted to have a punchy title and be self contained, dense, with links to references and data sources. There's a hefty appendix section so that when someone asks a "what about X?" question, there's a slide in there about alternatives considered and a data-centric reason on why it wasn't or shouldn't be pursued.

It's consultants doing everything in PPT. Imho it is very, very annoying.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com