Kivo now has diffing for PowerPoints | Hacker News Reader

Kivo now has diffing for PowerPoints

blog.kivo.com

42 pointspea21 comments

Hey guys, happy to answer any questions here or on email (leo@kivo.com). Enjoy!

I did not understand (non-native english speaker here) if it was a software, or an tool online (requiring the documents to be uploaded on the cloud). Can you provide some more information on this part?

Hey! Thanks for reaching out. We are a tool online which requires your documents to be in the cloud, but can slot into which cloud storage provider you are using (i.e. Dropbox, Box) easily. Ping me at leo@kivo.com and I'd be happy to walk you through it and get you guys set up.

Do you have Onedrive support?

Hey, we can build Onedrive integration. If you ping me on leo@kivo.com I'd be happy to discuss.

This is very cool, I love the idea! I am curious - do you store deltas between versions or the whole slide for each version? What kind of representation do yo use for a slide to allow computing deltas?

Hey! So, we store the whole slide. In terms of deltas, we found the easiest way around it was a combination of tracking the slide through it's markup (OpenXML sucks, but you can extrapolate some UUIDs which help with tracking.) A lot of our analysis actually comes from the images themselves though, as they are an easier format (I.e. to help us see if the slide has changed.)

Thanks for creating this. Some time in the future, we'll hopefully be all editing slides in the cloud, but this is useful till then in the corporate world. #DeathByPowerPoint

One question I have though, is where, in your blog, you said highlighting changed portion is more complicated to users than rendering the two slides side-by-side. I understand it is way more technically complex, but I hope you're pursuing that. For text slides, that feature is a must-have.

This looks amazing and would be exactly what my organization needs for collaboration in PowerPoint (which is a HUGE hassle that we deal with regularly), if only we could store the tool on our own server to avoid uploading to Kivo. Is something like that possible/in the works?

Hey, thanks for reaching out. It's something we are working on. Send me an email, I'd love to chat further: leo@kivo.com

Thanks for the reply! I'll try out the demo or freelancer version and email you this weekend when I'm more familiar with how it works. :)

Looks interesting.

Are people still using Powerpoint savy enough to collaborate on their documents in the first place?

Any hope of doing the same with Google Docs, Prezi or other more "modern" presentation software?

Hey! Great questions: there is a definite need to collaborate online in some form. This 'collaboration' is currently emailing around the versions. We'd like to think if you can make a process that is just as easy as that, you're in the money for the majority of users. Plus, this is a really big pain in the arse for people, so they tend to look for solutions.

Re GDocs, Prezi, etc: we definitely could in the future, but PowerPoint is still the ubiquitous solution for making presentations for the large majority of people, so will keep us busy for a while. Plus, PowerPoint users are in much more dire straits as to existing solutions than GDocs ones are (we are fans of GDocs, but realise that most people cannot use it because they can't move away from MS Office).

"Are people still using Powerpoint savy enough to collaborate on their documents in the first place?"

Is there some kind of IQ test needed to use Docs or Prezi? Would that be the reason not that many people use them?

People use what they know. Many office employees used PowerPoint before the online solutions were even an option, and many of these same people will continue to do so until something happens that forces them to relearn something else (and relearning is non-trivial). Inertia is a powerful thing, and PowerPoint has enough mindshare that its common to hear people say "make a powerpoint" instead of "make a slideshow".

I collaborate on PowerPoint presentations every time my organization has a major presentation due (frequently). The Track Changes feature in Microsoft Word is good enough for documents and all of my coworkers understand how it works, but wrangling everyone's changes into PowerPoint and then letting them know what changed is a nightmare.

When I edit a PowerPoint presentation, I usually add a comment to every slide that has changed and describe all changes to the slide. Other people might put a star on slides they updated, leave the original slide plus the new slide so I know which slides have changed, or not mark their changes at all. Also, we have to email the presentation back or forth or edit it from one shared folder (in which case, multiple people can't work on the slides at the same time). It is very inefficient.

As I wrote in another comment here, TortoiseSVN and TortoiseGit support diffing PowerPoints.

Have you used PowerPoint recently? In my experience it's no worse than Apple Keynote (although the latter is more affordable), and certainly more powerful than Google Slides.

TortoiseSVN and TortoiseGit already support diffing on PowerPoint, Excel and Word. It works reasonably well.

looks great Leo!

Cheers!

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