I make a lot of slides. I was in an Office shop, then Google Docs, now back to Office. On one hand, they all suck, and there are lots of horrible idiosyncrasies in each. On the other hand, they are both fine once you get used to them. I hated google slides when I switched, but I got used to it and hated PowerPoint when I switched back.
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.
At my company, we started using Figma for creating presentation and slides. Found that even though Figma isn't really designed for making slides like PowerPoint is for example, but folks picked up really quick because it was intuitive. Bonus points for being able to have a library of all of our company assets to use in any slides you were creating. Overall, whatever we lost from not having PowerPoint/Sheets, we gained from not having to pull your hair out fighting it.
Interesting - I've never used figma but I'd be open to trying it. My main concern is that I do a lot of collaboration on presentations, including outside my company, and there would be a lot more friction in having to get collaborators onboarded to figma.
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
I work in an organisation that does pitch decks, many incredibly designed pitch decks, all on Google Slides, and each and every point here is painfully valid.
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.
PowerPoint collaboration is … interesting, and gets more interesting as people mix web, Windows, and Mac apps simultaneously, and as the number of people on a single deck increases (which seems like an edge case, but more than once I’ve had up to thirty-odd people in a deck editing and observing right up to a proposal submission deadline). Versions are prone to race conditions, data gets lost, and each version of PP imposes its own weird idiosyncrasies on the deck. Even so, it’s still the best of the slideware builders; if I didn’t have Office I’d probably fall back to LibreOffice; then Indesign; then Keynote; then paper and pencil; and then consider cuneiform or cave paintings. After that, I’d probably consider Slides, but only if the client rejected a proposal to present through the collective medium of slam poetry and interpretive dance.
As someone that heavily uses PowerPoint collaboration - I would say that it's got a lot better and keeps getting better. It's not perfect, but it's much better than it was two years ago (and the number of conflicts keep coming down).
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).
Microsoft’s collaboration tools seem designed to ensure no matter what, every file will end up in multiple places online and as multiple local copies. Click a link in MS teams chat. Are you working in one person’s weird sharepoint without them even knowing they are using sharepoint? Company sharepoint? Onedrive? Nobody knows. Oops, you don’t have permission to edit anyway and the sharer doesn’t know how to add you. Congratulations now you are owner of the local file presentation-v2_JW-comments.pptx. When you drag that back into teams, now it’s on your weird personal sharepoint that you yourself didn’t even know existed.
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?
It does but I think in general MS products will be more attractive to a mixed (PC/Mac) organization than iCloud. It's virtually impossible in most industries to not have to work with MS Office documents with external parties (and internal, good luck hiring legal or accounting people and telling them they can only use icloud).
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.
Yep, all the warts are totally forgotten the moment you have to use Powerpoint or Keynote again and have to coordinate with changes with multiple people.
My only issue with slides is that indention is super strange. You can be editing a list of nice tightly indented bullets, and then bam - one of them is suddenly an inch away from the rest. And that little bullet is contagious, it will eat and infect all the other nicely formatted list bullets like an out of control zombie movie. Internally, I assume the feature is named "We're all already indented 3 inches".
The "white example color in toolbar under letter on white background" is a gem.
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.
What is particularly hilarious is that the button isn't setting the color of a line below the text but of the text itself so why is the icon changing the color of an underline?
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.
If that is what they are call them what they are not something else.
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.
How often is Google Docs updated with new features?
I’ve never thought about it until now. Every couple years we get a new Microsoft Office with new features and a lot of press covering it. I can't recall seeing coverage for new Google Docs updates.
Try to get text to flow around a rectangular image in slides. You know, how PowerPoint 97 can. It is impossible. I filed a bug for this a decade ago when I worked at Google. Nope. Still cannot be done.
You can't (or couldn't) do this in Android UI either. Unless you give up and do a webview widget. (that would have likely fixed the rest of my Android UI issues too)
The reason they can get away with not fixing basic things is because they don’t operate in a market that has healthy competition. I can’t think of how customers can get something better without addressing that issue.
I use slides.com, I find it perfect for my needs. The solution to go with plain text and Pandoc and git is ok for software guys but if you want to make nice slides easily I find slides.com to be very effective. Just my 2 cents!
Just hilarious how Google is so celebrated for Material Design (yes because everything, including desktop apps, should be touch-optimized) when their actual product design is hot garbage, like most of their products. GMail won because it was better than Hotmail. That…wasn’t a very high bar. It’s still damn hard to find any given setting for a Google thing, and some have bizarre limitations (e.g. I cannot in any way show my work GCal on my Google Home Pro Plus Max display that I got for free at CES, because apparently Google Apps business accounts are wholly incompatible with “home” products that can only work with personal, non-Google-apps accounts). Most of their products just die a slow, unfounded death. Their public APIs are a nightmare to work with, sporadically documented, and have clients that either don’t work with my version of Python, have wack 80-deep dependency chains (because they were developed, err auto-generated by a Java engineer) and all the developer ergonomics of a St. Andrew's Cross.
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.
Painfully relatable :). In a similar vein, Google's Calculator app for Android and ChromeOS doesn't allow you to input parentheses (there's no button for it, despite there being three "pages" of buttons, and it mysteriously does not allow you to paste them into the input field).
Oh yes, that's the other Android calculator. The one in which you can't arbitrarily edit the input field, only backspace from the right. Especially frustrating when modifying expression with parentheses.
OmniGraffle is the only software I've found that works for making slides. It has been out for decades now and everyone else keeps making shit. I honestly don't understand how companies can throw millions of dollars and thousands of engineer-hours at this problem and still fail to do basic things like snapping to a grid or aligning text.
But omnigraffle is not designed for slides, it's for diagrams. Does it have slides features, like presenter's notes that will be displayed only on one screen ?
Does it have animations ?
Nope. If you want those, indeed, you'll need a different app.
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).
Do they still have a non subscription option? I feel like some of the most functional apps are reasonably priced but worse tools that cost a lot over time have somehow taken up market share and mind share.
It is the kind of software, that is shitty, but millions of people use, because they are unaware of how much better software for the same purpose can be, because they have not tried other options. Every time I have to use either a Google docs document or some Office 365 document, I discover things like nested unordered lists being broken, no styles for some kind of element, not being able to save new styles. It is just ridiculous, that people consider these softwares to be appropriate solutions. They are the lowest common denominator plus an extra portion of bugs.
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.
One issue with Office 365 Excel that I forgot to mention: Try moving the cursor using the arrow keys on your keyboard real quick. For me it sometimes deletes cell contents, when I press right+down. (How can such a thing ever happen?!) I found this when I was idly trying to move the selection in a "circle" (well a square of 2x2 cells) and mispressed.
When it is forced upon me, I have to use Office 365 on the job. That is how I discover all these silly issues.
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.
Collaborating on documents on slides is not the same as collaborating on a code base. Git is an awful replacement for that. Maybe something like Liveshare would be more like it.
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.
I need to sit down and redo my resume, currently in Google Docs, to LaTeX with Pandoc. Very powerful tools and I much prefer plaintext with git of course.
Probably, but that would have been miserable for them, as I lazily ran the PDF though a PDF to docx converter online and that presumably created a Word file completely full of absolutely-positioned text boxes.
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.