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Comment by untilHellbanned | Hacker News Reader

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?

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.

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).

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.

"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".

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