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Comment by d3Xt3r | Hacker News Reader

> I recently tried Claude Cowork for PowerPoint and I was stunned by the content as well as design quality of the deck it produced. That's a threat for Microsoft because now you don't need the editing tools of PowerPoint, AI replaces it, so all you need is the presentation mode of PowerPoint.

Actually, someone here posted a Claude Code skill recently that generates a presentation as a self-contained HTML5 file, so all you need is a browser.

PowerPoint, as a whole, is doomed.

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Powerpoint will continue to persist because other people need to be able to edit your slide deck without understanding your HTML.

My employer blocks office plugins, so I can't try Claude for PowerPoint, but sometimes I get Claude to generate Python scripts, which produce PowerPoint slides via python-pptx. This also benefits from being able to easily read and generate figures from raw data.

I don't really like the way Claude tends to format slides (too much marketing speak and flowcharts), but it has good ideas often enough that it's still worth it to me. So I treat this as a starting point and replace the bad parts.

Or you could just talk to powerpoint, which creates a self contained pptx, which also plays anywhere.

we've hit this point where its cool to have claude reinvent every wheel just because it can.

It's not self-contained, it requires PowerPoint to be indfled. Which is not an issue on corporate machines of course, but maybe you want to do a presentation for a general/broader audience.

Office, or rather Microsoft 365 applications have had web versions for a decade now.

That's besides the point though. With a self-contained HTML, you don't need to go to a special website, you don't need an account or sign-in, heck you don't even need the Internet, and it works pretty much on every device that supports HTML5.

a solution in search of a problem. everyone can open a powerpoint in google docs, hotmail, libreoffice etc.

now the person receiving the file has a DIFFERENT experience than they are used to with every other presentation. different hotkeys, different troubleshooting.

I'm not sure that's true - try getting someone to pull up an html5 file on their computer for a presentation...

You mean like, double-click?

you must never have actually done this. it doesn't work the way you think it does. unless it's self contained (like a pp), you can't expect network access to actually deliver when you need it most.

The file the Claude skill spits out is actually fully self-contained, no network access is needed.

that's pretty cool!

hrm, double-click and your browser does the rest.

For added benefit, full screen?

Until you need presenter notes or other niceties, this covers a large space of usage.

you could do that for the past 20 years. i've always hated slides as a medium for anything, but i've been proven wrong tine and again that people love their pp.

Because it was drag and drop interface. This existed for HTML but because web pages got too complicated, so did the WYSIWYGs. By just being a program to show slides, the editing experience was manageable for anyone. But if you can hust type what you want to happen into claude, editng experience doesnt matter as much/at all

I'd love to get a link to that comment/post!

https://github.com/shawnzam/keynot

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