PowerPoint is somewhat awesome though, yar.
Everything it does can be done better elsewhere, but it does so much that you can use one thing rather than learn several new tools separately.
You just have to get past and ignore the "Microsoft" part, to see that Office is a legit achievement bc of all the work they put into that.
Ofc it doesn't compare to Latex, but that's like a different class of tool entirely so it's okay:-).
I have started learning LaTeX (about to dive back in actually) as I edit my thesis together into something that resembles something more than a ranting tangent. It is scratching my probable undx autism obsession itch hella hard. Overleaf is actually a really great tool when you have purpose.
I like Overleaf but it completely fucked up the LaTeX templates my university provided.
Fortunately mine already had one on there, unofficially. It works!
PowerPoint is ridiculously capable, like to an unnecessary degree.
I HATE Microsoft, it is evil, and moreover it was evil long before Apple and Google etc. became thus (and before Facebook, Twitter/X, etc. existed).
But ngl, Office is solid. I've run Office products on any personal machine I've been on - Windows, Mac OSX, and Linux (Wine) - and every time I have tried to switch to an open-source version I keep going back.
If I had to do heavy math then I would invest the time to learn to use Beamer, but for everything else, PowerPoint does so much with ease.
I mean, it's okay.... I feel like I run into inconveniences in MSO every day. Off the top of my head (solutions welcome):
- Absurd startup times for opening documents. Worse if there isn't an instance of the app already open. Part of the blame goes to my company's antivirus software, but Excel and PowerPoint are easily my slowest-starting apps, and Word is the runner-up. All UI animations are also stupidly slow, though I think that was a design choice.
- A pasted graphic goes to the center of the slide in ppt regardless of the current zoom or view. Annoying for making large posters, exacerbated by delayed rendering of lots of graphics.
- Likewise, zooming occurs relative to slide's center, not the current zoomed view or from the mouse pointer.
- No easily accessibly horizontal scroll outside of using a touchpad (i.e., scrollbar only). Tilting the mouse wheel (if I even have access to such a mouse) either doesn't work or only slightly nudges the view. Also makes posters tedious in combination with pasting issue. Something like shift+mousewheel would be nice.
- Dragging a scroll bar does not update the view until you release it.
- Sometimes the amount of space between a bullet point and text in a PPT text box changes when all others are remain the same. Possibly a skill issue related to styles. Still frustrating.
- Dragging objects autoaligns them to seemingly everything except what I want it to. I now run with snapping turned off.
- Pasting charts between documents changes to destination formatting/styling by default.
- Pasting text from external sources keeps formatting by default. Never have I ever wanted to copy a web page's or email's font, color, and size into my own docs. I could have sworn that there were also circumstances where ctrl+alt+v doesn't work properly, but I can't seem to remember/reproduce that at the moment.
- Dates in Excel. It's a meme, but also true.
- Excel seems to have a "root" window (the doc opened first), and it does not play nice with virtual desktops. If you try to open a spreadsheet from Windows Explorer or some other app (e.g. web browser) on VD B while the root window is on VD A, you are forcibly switched to VD A, where the doc actually opens (after a complimentary delay, of course). Then I have to find the freaking window in Task View and move it back to VD B. There is a reason I wasn't adding more windows to VD A to begin with. Incidentally Word and other MSO apps do not have this issue for some reason.
- If one doc window freezes/stops responding, they all do.
- Aligning things in Word
- A few common color palettes are not colorblind-friendly.
Okay so all true but... genuinely, do you have an alternative to suggest? I have thought about switching to a more LaTeX layout style editing platform even not for mathematical formulas, since part of the issue is simply using WYSIWYG. PowerPoint at least has workarounds for most things - e.g. in the details panel (click click, click click click - it used to be a direct menu item but now it is quite buried, at least in my current version) you can input a numerical value for the x and y position relative to the slide's upper left corner i.e. its absolute position). That requires a significantly lower barrier to entry than editing source code but if the latter offers superior functionality with less hassle...
As for Word and Excel, the same thought applies: what else even comes close? I spent quite some time learning R and therefore hate it with a burning passion - especially the existing libraries like ggplot (granted I am several years out of date there so there's a slim possibility that literally everything about it has changed and it is awesome now?). There I believe a solid alternative would be Python libraries e.g. MatPlotLib (+SciPy + NumPy), but even that I would guess depends on what you want to do, like it would replace the plotting part, but if you still wanted that more visual exploration, or a "view" of the data to send to someone, the visual spreadsheet is kinda neat?
More than a decade of effort went into making MSO, and unfortunately even more would need to be done still in order to improve further as you pointed out, but at this point even if FOSS catches up to all of that, I am still going to respect MSO for having done it first to blaze the trail (even while I switch to the FOSS alternative for daily use:-).
Do you have an alternative to suggest?
For the general user? Not really, I'm just venting :) I have the unsubstantiated, possibly irrational belief that MSO UX ought to be far more polished after having existed for so long. Like you said, most of my frustrations have workarounds, even if they are buried or tedious (though the tedium is part of my contention).
For making slides or posters, someone in school recommended to lay out a poster or each slide completely in ChemDraw (basically a specialized, widely used vector-based WYSIWYG editor for organic chemistry) and paste the lot onto a PPT slide. That works reasonably well and makes everything have a consistent look, especially since most slides of mine contain chemdraws of molecules anyway. ChemDraw does have its own warts and somewhat limited functionality beyond drawing molecules and text. Also, since like 2019 the rendering and UI have gotten so much slower. For posters and basic diagraming, I currently use Inkscape, pasting things as needed. Inkscape also has its quirks, but its interface is so much more powerful and the UI so much more responsive than either ChemDraw or PPT that it is the clear winner for me. Though, it is also not winning any startup races.
For Excel, you're unfortunately correct; there is no suitable WYSIWYG spreadsheet replacement. While I can do essentially all of the typical numerical hacking I do in Excel with (IMO) a better experience in LibreOffice Calc, it falls down when I need to show it to someone else. The charting in Calc is lackluster, and it doesn't play nice with Office file formats. Also, my workplace (though not me personally) makes heavy use of Excel UI + VBA + fortran (!) DLLs for reactor modeling...
LO Writer is probably the closest to Word in usability, but compatibility with Word files is still subpar, mostly to do with styling and formatting. Both are bloated for probably 50% of my use (e.g., writing up informal procedures or meeting minutes). Wordpad (RIP) is nice in that regard.
it used to be a direct menu item but now it is quite buried....
My colleague swears that UI in MSO before Office 2007 was so much better, but I can't comment much on that.
What's your issue with showing libreofficd spreadsheets to others?
The sheets themselves are usually unproblematic, but the charts often don't render properly when viewed in MSO. This is relevant because the other party usually does not have LO installed.
Oh the actual UX is horrible, and ironically I confirm what your colleague said that it used to be better than now. It has suffered from the enshittification process the same as everything else these days in our terminal stages of capitalism. Imagine if there was actually competition! Instead, Microsoft went around purchasing any competing product, and rather than absorb the new features simply remove it from the market - bc one implementation of the evolutionary strategy of survival of the fittest is to be better than others, but a far cheaper move is to simply kill off everything else so that you are all that's left. In the authoritarian sense that "you'll take what we offer and like it", it works, bc people are unwilling or unable to put in the time & effort to do better, with FOSS.
Ironically for an unbloated editor for quick stuff, I use gVim, if I am on my own machine.:-) Wordpad would be good if you have to be on a generic Windows machine though - I think it can even do bulleted lists?
Furthermore, on a Mac the implementation of MSO is even less optimal, especially irt battery. So it's not even like I "like" it, it just seems the least horrible option available:-(.
I don't use gVim, but for work stuff that I don't have to share (mosly just notes), I use markdown in Obsidian w/ vi mode :) It's not FOSS and Electron is bloat, but it is really slick, and my boss approved expensing the $50 seat license for business. I might check out logseq in the future, but Obsidian was a lot more mature back when I was looking around. My only beef is that Markdown doesn't natively support sub/superscripts, which are kinda important for chemistry. Most editors implement extensions, but they're not always portable.
Obligatory joke warning, incoming in 3... 2... 1...
Do you want to know something that can handle subscripts? And superscripts too? MSO!:-) That's why it's hard to replace - it just does so very much, it has solid foundationals, even if like you said every tiny little aspect of it can drive us nuts.
Yeah I don't like Microsoft but like Office, I just run offline pirated version of their main programs. It's like how I avoid Google for 70% of options but absolutely love Google Maps and Google Translate.
There are different teams that work on different products. Devs != Marketing for one I guess. Anyway those are all legit achievements that we can recognize, and still know that the corporation is evil, or even if it was not that we don't want to rely on a for-profit corp for everything important that we need.:-)
