Google Slides Is Hilarious(medium.com) |
Google Slides Is Hilarious(medium.com) |
Google slides is definitely better as a web app. The web version of PowerPoint is unusable. On the other hand, office on the whole is much more polished, has more features, and things you'd take for granted like cut and paste between all the office programs (didnt work for g-suite last time I checked).
The main reason I use office now (in my own business) is because ironically Microsoft is way more customer friendly than google, and I don't want some arbitrary google product change or ML ruling to destroy my business, so I would never use them for something professional. That's much more of a concern than box alignment.
For better or worse, that had always been the appeal or MS Office, pretty much every business uses it so it's easy to share documents. Just like I might rather do my writing in LaTeX, I'm stuck with MS word because of interoperability
Why is indentation in physical units and not points... and why is that linked to the language... and why can I not do 0.05 inches but I can do 0.05cm? Its all nonsense.
All that said, the collaborative editing features of Google Docs in general are so good, its almost worth the rest of the crud.
[0]: https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/office/share-and-collabo...
[1]: https://support.apple.com/guide/keynote/intro-to-collaborati...
Oh, your company trained everyone how to make sure all files are on the company sharepoint? Not going to stick because the online versions lack extremely basic features like copy-paste that works reliably and “merge cells”. You can open online files in the desktop app, but you’ll soon be back to a local copy because working online in the desktop app is unusable for things like “dragging a text box around”.
iCloud collaboration works fine in my experience but only on Macs which makes it a non-starter for most companies. And can you even have have a company-wide iCloud files system, or can you only share individual files with people?
The shapes, well it's flowcharting symbols. And I personally prefer left justified default in boxes but I get it's POLA breaking from other slide ecologies.
Pandoc slides look better and better and are almost zettelkasten with the "digression down here" flow thing.
The only answer I can think of is that they tried to set the text color on the button but then the button was entirely invisible so rather than taking a step back and realise that they might need to rethink they just coloured an underline instead.
But at least they put a name there! Icons are [already] a terrible idea if there is enough space, they just fail to explain what they are but if you make them all the same color explaining or remembering how to navigate menu's to do something gets even worse.
Like click on: this > then this > then this > then this
Becomes: ? > ? > ? > foobar!
The color picker is one of the few that could have had a self explanatory icon. Its the easiest feature to find in nearly all other applications.
Google doesn’t make good products anymore, and they destroy all the value in any company they acquire and actually try to do anything with.
PowerPoint-style animations are rarely helpful, in my experience. Either the animation is a pointless distraction, in which case you are better off without it; or the animation is necessary to convey the content, in which case no slide tool would suffice and you are better off with a video or a purpose-built vector animation (perhaps an interactive one).
Powerpoint on Office 365 is a joke. You try to work with bullet lists in a presentation and you are f'ed. The stupid thing doesn't work. Indentation and unindentation are not 2 opposite operations that easily revert each other. It's completely broken.
Recently I hit another bug in online Excel. Whenever I would enter a number into a cell, it would take that number, split it up into digits and add line breaks between those digits. wtf. I was unable to input a simple integer number correctly into any cell. How has this bug even been deployed without anyone noticing?! I guess they don't have proper quality assurance, testing with all major browsers. Or they just out of principle give me the middle finger, because I am not using their silly Edge browser.
Don't get me started about how sluggish everything feels.
Similar is true for MS Teams. That is one of the biggest offenders. MS has, in the year 2022, still not managed to do, what Discord and others have gotten solved years ago. Voice chat in the browser. You cannot use MS Teams with Firefox properly. It will tell you something about your browser not being supported, while it is actually them who f'ed up and basically every other voice chat solution works just fine. They try to give you that picture of your browser being inappropriate, while their own shitty software is the thing that is inappropriate. Surely scares many people into using Edge or something. MS Teams has always had a bug in the desktop app (which you have to use, if you don't want to use a non-Firefox browser ...), that at some point it tells me, that my "microphone is not working". It is a silent warning, that pops up in the call window, so that I only see it, when I look there. No notification, no warning sound, nothing. I basically only notice, when someone asks, whether I am still in the call. But that's not all, no no ... They recently f'ed it up even more, by simply not _showing_ that message any longer! Now the bug hits me completely silently. Must have been one great bugfix of some developer there. "Hey, how can we make that bug go away? Ah, I know! Just don't show that error bubble any longer! Then no one will know that there is a bug! I can go home early today!" -- Or whatever that person has been thinking.
That is the state of Office 365 as well. Bug-ridden shitty software, that doesn't get the most basic things right. I think Word 95 or something worked better. With Google docs the functionality is even more limited. It's like a little child's toy, compared to an actual word processor. Take any of the bigger free/libre solutions, they are hundreds of times better than those Google docs or Office 365 toys.
The table at the end is oblivious to adult solutions.
LaTeX + Beamer or Pandoc slides. Collaboration? Git.
But Beamer, really? Now you’re oblivious to any people that has the slightest eye for design. Beamer slides are the worst: the defaults suck, they’re hard to customize, and more importantly no one wants to touch LaTeX today, it’s a waste of time for very few advantages.
Ha crazy how this mentality still pervades HN even after that famous Dropbox comment.
First recruiter: "we need a docx file". Argh!
When it is not forced upon me, I usually use LibreOffice Impress, which also has its issues. When I am done, I export as PDF and then use presentation mode of my PDF reader to present the slides.
I have also seen fancy online tools, which have simpler slides but more navigation during presentation, with up,down,left,right switchting to other slides in a "field of slides" instead of a mere "sequence of slides" like in traditional more power point like tools. I would also like to use things like the Racket lang for slides for example, but haven't looked at it in detail.
But when making a presentation for the job, it might contain material, that is not to be released, so I can only use the sanctified online tool (Office 365), or offline tools. What's more is, that there is a sort of template, which I am supposed to conform to, which of course is done in Office 365 Powerpoint. And of course you cannot export that template properly, to use it in other applications. Well, at least one thing I noticed positively about Office 365: You can export finished documents to Open Document Foundation formats like .odt. That is actually a move, that I do not fully understand MS making. Usually they want to keep everything in the MS world, everything proprietary formats, but then they offer that export. It's almost unreal.
Anyway, even if there was no better tool, that would still not be a justification or excuse for the absolute horrible quality of software, that is Office 365 and Google Docs. I would feel more comfortable using a DSL to code up my slides than using those tools.
But yes - much better than Google Docs, which has some frankly bizarre limitations each time I try to use it.
Excel collaboration on the other hand... good luck! (I suspect an application of the complexity of Excel just won't be able to be easily made collaborative... Google Sheets manages it, however it is a much simpler app that can handle less data and has much less functionality).
You can't do folder sharing though which is definitely a non starter for most orgs.
Even though I really prefer google drive to anything else, it also suffers from this problem, too. Even if it were perfect at editing native Office documents, you still inevitably end up with people saving files as office documents and working locally for both legitimate and illegitimate reasons.
Frankly, every job I've applied for at this point just has me re-entering everything- even my internal system!