{"slug": "powerpoint", "name": "PowerPoint", "category": "other", "category_name": "Other software", "description": "", "recommenders": 3, "commenters": 12, "warners": 3, "score": 1.452, "rising": 0.35, "first": "2025-11-16", "latest": "2026-10-27", "why": "I went back to PowerPoint, and with the same time it took me to make one lecture note in quadro, I could make 4 lectures notes in PowerPoint, and they were better.", "why_is_quote": true, "has_verdict": false, "sentiment": {"recommend": 3, "neutral": 5, "compare": 1, "warn": 3}, "spark": [1, 1, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 1], "listed": true, "loved": [], "caveat": "", "short_quote": "I went back to PowerPoint, and with the same time it took me to make one lecture note in quadro, I could make 4 lectures notes in PowerPoint, and they were better.", "icon": false, "domain": null, "github_repo": null, "official_url": "https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoft-365/powerpoint", "pricing": "", "aliases": ["PowerPoint"], "verdict": null, "praise": [{"label": "", "summary": "", "quotes": [{"id": 804120816, "item_id": 50257551, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50257551", "by": "bonesss", "date": "2026-10-27", "stance": "recommend", "quote": "I use PowerPoint for that.", "excerpt": "I use PowerPoint for that. Draw outlines, or use graphics, wire up clickable areas, and interaction flows, and you\u2019ve got a presentable \u201clive\u201d demo that doesn\u2019t run afoul of issues presenting demo sites to non-techies (placeholder text, ugly buttons, test domains, colours, etc).", "context": "", "use_case": "clickable mock demos", "switched_from": "", "story": "The Mythical Man-Month in the Age of AI"}, {"id": 741450817, "item_id": 46340676, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46340676", "by": "tamimio", "date": "2025-12-20", "stance": "recommend", "quote": "I used to make similar in powerpoint, surprisingly it has good svg/obj support", "excerpt": "This looks great! Would be good to download a ready binary too. I used to make similar in powerpoint, surprisingly it has good svg/obj support, with some creativity you can do wonders. Can the output be exported to common file types? Videos or similar, it would better imo.", "context": "", "use_case": "3D presentations", "switched_from": "", "story": "Immersa: Open-source Web-based 3D Presentation Tool"}, {"id": 735102610, "item_id": 45943913, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45943913", "by": "somethingsome", "date": "2025-11-16", "stance": "recommend", "quote": "I went back to PowerPoint, and with the same time it took me to make one lecture note in quadro, I could make 4 lectures notes in PowerPoint, and they were better.", "excerpt": "I used reveal.js and quadro to make lecture slides. And as much as I wanted to like it, it never worked out. For easy presentations and pitch deck I'm sure it works well.. But the people behind those tools do not seem to have the experience of working with structured lecture notes. When teaching you need many tools, such as background removal from images, easy cropping, arrows, animating the text in a predefined orde", "context": "teaches lectures", "use_case": "lecture slides", "switched_from": "Quarto", "story": "Writing a book with Quarto"}]}], "caveats": [{"label": "", "summary": "", "quotes": [{"id": 792215136, "item_id": 49513446, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49513446", "by": "computomatic", "date": "2026-08-31", "stance": "warn", "quote": "Then I used PowerPoint via the browser and found this level of data loss is a regular occurrence.", "excerpt": "Most likely a SaaS app that auto-saves, but didn\u2019t save properly. Then closing the laptop caused a network disconnect, and the in-browser app did not recover gracefully while awaiting reconnect on wake-up and lost all unsaved data. This would have been unbelievable to me before this year. Then I used PowerPoint via the browser and found this level of data loss is a regular occurrence.", "context": "", "use_case": "web-based presentations", "switched_from": "", "story": "Student teacher arrested for private Snapchat message"}, {"id": 782738225, "item_id": 48921139, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48921139", "by": "laci37", "date": "2026-07-15", "stance": "warn", "quote": "last month I had to fight to zoom in on something in PowerPoint", "excerpt": "I mostly feel this on Microsoft stuff. O365 browser stuff was always buggy, but last month I had to fight to zoom in on something in PowerPoint. Pagination in Azure ML randomly broke, it took them a month to fix it. Atlassian is also a bug factory, but I did not expect anything better of them. Each UI update they did to Confluence and Jira just made everything more confusing in the last 10 years.", "context": "", "use_case": "", "switched_from": "", "story": "Ask HN: Is it just me, or is software buggier across the board?"}, {"id": 739182400, "item_id": 46198900, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46198900", "by": "codethief", "date": "2025-12-08", "stance": "warn", "quote": "I had to use PowerPoint in the browser for the first time (I use Linux, so no native app) and\u2026 it turns out it's completely and utterly broken?", "excerpt": "I don't use Office365 much, apart from maybe Outlook (which I have to, for some of my work). However, the other day I had to use PowerPoint in the browser for the first time (I use Linux, so no native app) and\u2026 it turns out it's completely and utterly broken? I mean, the document looked nothing like the presentation my coworker ended up giving (using the desktop application on Windows(?)). What I saw in the browser w", "context": "Linux user", "use_case": "viewing presentations", "switched_from": "", "story": "Microsoft increases Office 365 and Microsoft 365 license prices"}]}], "who": [{"by": "bojta-lepenye", "context": "self-published author", "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48239422", "date": "2026-05-22"}, {"by": "somethingsome", "context": "teaches lectures", "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45943913", "date": "2025-11-16"}], "tags": [], "use_cases": ["clickable mock demos", "web-based presentations", "simple games and animations", "interactive clickable tour", "scientific presentations", "making graphs"], "compared": [{"slug": "quarto", "name": "Quarto", "co": 1, "switched_from": 1, "switched_to": 0}, {"slug": "reveal-js", "name": "reveal.js", "co": 2, "switched_from": 0, "switched_to": 0}, {"slug": "bento", "name": "Bento", "co": 2, "switched_from": 0, "switched_to": 0}], "makers": [], "threads": [{"url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49236811", "title": "Idol Mahjong Final Romance: A Slideshow Disguised as a Video Game", "mentions": 2}, {"url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46336097", "title": "Immersa: Open-source Web-based 3D Presentation Tool", "mentions": 2}, {"url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50255298", "title": "The Mythical Man-Month in the Age of AI", "mentions": 1}, {"url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49512789", "title": "Student teacher arrested for private Snapchat message", "mentions": 1}, {"url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48920698", "title": "Ask HN: Is it just me, or is software buggier across the board?", "mentions": 1}, {"url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48596219", "title": "Ask HN: What do you use for scientific presentations?", "mentions": 1}], "sentiment_by_month": {"2025-11": {"recommend": 1}, "2025-12": {"warn": 1, "neutral": 1, "recommend": 1}, "2026-01": {}, "2026-02": {}, "2026-03": {}, "2026-04": {}, "2026-05": {"neutral": 2}, "2026-06": {"compare": 1}, "2026-07": {"warn": 1}, "2026-08": {"neutral": 2, "warn": 1}, "2026-09": {}, "2026-10": {"recommend": 1}}, "quotes": [{"id": 804120816, "item_id": 50257551, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50257551", "by": "bonesss", "date": "2026-10-27", "stance": "recommend", "quote": "I use PowerPoint for that.", "excerpt": "I use PowerPoint for that. Draw outlines, or use graphics, wire up clickable areas, and interaction flows, and you\u2019ve got a presentable \u201clive\u201d demo that doesn\u2019t run afoul of issues presenting demo sites to non-techies (placeholder text, ugly buttons, test domains, colours, etc).", "context": "", "use_case": "clickable mock demos", "switched_from": "", "story": "The Mythical Man-Month in the Age of AI"}, {"id": 792215136, "item_id": 49513446, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49513446", "by": "computomatic", "date": "2026-08-31", "stance": "warn", "quote": "Then I used PowerPoint via the browser and found this level of data loss is a regular occurrence.", "excerpt": "Most likely a SaaS app that auto-saves, but didn\u2019t save properly. Then closing the laptop caused a network disconnect, and the in-browser app did not recover gracefully while awaiting reconnect on wake-up and lost all unsaved data. This would have been unbelievable to me before this year. Then I used PowerPoint via the browser and found this level of data loss is a regular occurrence.", "context": "", "use_case": "web-based presentations", "switched_from": "", "story": "Student teacher arrested for private Snapchat message"}, {"id": 788682720, "item_id": 49292670, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49292670", "by": "wildzzz", "date": "2026-08-13", "stance": "neutral", "quote": "I used to make simple games and animations like that in PowerPoint.", "excerpt": "I used to make simple games and animations like that in PowerPoint. Then I discovered geocities and helped make some click and point games with a friend who did all handdrawn artwork that I'd scan in. Then I hit puberty and my brain turned to mush for a bit. I wish I still had that stuff. It's not I'm any geocities archive I've seen online.", "context": "", "use_case": "simple games and animations", "switched_from": "", "story": "Idol Mahjong Final Romance: A Slideshow Disguised as a Video Game"}, {"id": 788675312, "item_id": 49292207, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49292207", "by": "hightrix", "date": "2026-08-13", "stance": "neutral", "quote": "I used it to create an interactive tour through a historic house in my home town.", "excerpt": "This is really cool. Old school video game developers were really creative with their usage of technology. Mildly related, in high school back when Power Point was new (yes, dating myself a bit), I used it to create an interactive tour through a historic house in my home town. Users could click on a door to enter a room, click back to move back, and explore the full house. It was a wild maze of click areas to numbere", "context": "", "use_case": "interactive clickable tour", "switched_from": "", "story": "Idol Mahjong Final Romance: A Slideshow Disguised as a Video Game"}, {"id": 782738225, "item_id": 48921139, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48921139", "by": "laci37", "date": "2026-07-15", "stance": "warn", "quote": "last month I had to fight to zoom in on something in PowerPoint", "excerpt": "I mostly feel this on Microsoft stuff. O365 browser stuff was always buggy, but last month I had to fight to zoom in on something in PowerPoint. Pagination in Azure ML randomly broke, it took them a month to fix it. Atlassian is also a bug factory, but I did not expect anything better of them. Each UI update they did to Confluence and Jira just made everything more confusing in the last 10 years.", "context": "", "use_case": "", "switched_from": "", "story": "Ask HN: Is it just me, or is software buggier across the board?"}, {"id": 777626944, "item_id": 48601684, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48601684", "by": "gus_massa", "date": "2026-06-19", "stance": "compare", "quote": "Powerpoint is on the other extreme, so every formula is painful", "excerpt": "Popwerpoint! In Beamer is too easy to add formulas and difficult to add graphics, so people present walllllllllllls of formulas. Powerpoint is on the other extreme, so every formula is painful and you use as few as possible. [Mathematician, but now I'm mostly working in applications to Physics.] Anyway, for my last talk I needed a lot of graphics of polynomials, so I used Beamer with a few macros of Tikz to make cons", "context": "Mathematician working in applications to Physics", "use_case": "scientific presentations", "switched_from": "", "story": "Ask HN: What do you use for scientific presentations?"}, {"id": 772110848, "item_id": 48256928, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48256928", "by": "JKCalhoun", "date": "2026-05-24", "stance": "neutral", "quote": "a few minutes trying various styles in PowerPoint", "excerpt": "I (perhaps mistakenly) saw the article as metaphor. 50 hours to draw a line graph vs. a few minutes trying various styles in PowerPoint. Stop letting machines make graphs, pay a draftsman like we used to do! (I'm fairly dense though, so I probably completely missed that the author was instead simply espousing the joys of learning a new handicraft.)", "context": "", "use_case": "making graphs", "switched_from": "", "story": "I spent 50 hours drawing a line graph"}, {"id": 771830753, "item_id": 48239422, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48239422", "by": "bojta-lepenye", "date": "2026-05-22", "stance": "neutral", "quote": "I made all of the diagrams in PowerPoint myself", "excerpt": "Thank you so much. Yes, the book is self-published. For the typesetting, I used https://reedsy.com/ . I made all of the diagrams in PowerPoint myself, and just inserted them as high-quality images.", "context": "self-published author", "use_case": "book diagrams", "switched_from": "", "story": "Show HN: I Dedicated 4 Years to Mastering Offline Password Cracking"}, {"id": 741450817, "item_id": 46340676, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46340676", "by": "tamimio", "date": "2025-12-20", "stance": "recommend", "quote": "I used to make similar in powerpoint, surprisingly it has good svg/obj support", "excerpt": "This looks great! Would be good to download a ready binary too. I used to make similar in powerpoint, surprisingly it has good svg/obj support, with some creativity you can do wonders. Can the output be exported to common file types? Videos or similar, it would better imo.", "context": "", "use_case": "3D presentations", "switched_from": "", "story": "Immersa: Open-source Web-based 3D Presentation Tool"}, {"id": 741381712, "item_id": 46336357, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46336357", "by": "albert_e", "date": "2025-12-20", "stance": "neutral", "quote": "I used it once for a fancy presentation and it worked fine.", "excerpt": "interesting -- but i am not sure one would want to build an entire presentation with a lot of 3D effects and animations IMO this would be a good tool to have among many -- to use judiciously only when needed. -- Maybe if we could somehow integrate this capability into existing tools (not sure how). (I think MS Powerpoint has some 3D objects and animations -- but I dont see it used much in business. I used it once for", "context": "", "use_case": "3D objects and animations in slides", "switched_from": "", "story": "Immersa: Open-source Web-based 3D Presentation Tool"}, {"id": 739182400, "item_id": 46198900, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46198900", "by": "codethief", "date": "2025-12-08", "stance": "warn", "quote": "I had to use PowerPoint in the browser for the first time (I use Linux, so no native app) and\u2026 it turns out it's completely and utterly broken?", "excerpt": "I don't use Office365 much, apart from maybe Outlook (which I have to, for some of my work). However, the other day I had to use PowerPoint in the browser for the first time (I use Linux, so no native app) and\u2026 it turns out it's completely and utterly broken? I mean, the document looked nothing like the presentation my coworker ended up giving (using the desktop application on Windows(?)). What I saw in the browser w", "context": "Linux user", "use_case": "viewing presentations", "switched_from": "", "story": "Microsoft increases Office 365 and Microsoft 365 license prices"}, {"id": 735102610, "item_id": 45943913, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45943913", "by": "somethingsome", "date": "2025-11-16", "stance": "recommend", "quote": "I went back to PowerPoint, and with the same time it took me to make one lecture note in quadro, I could make 4 lectures notes in PowerPoint, and they were better.", "excerpt": "I used reveal.js and quadro to make lecture slides. And as much as I wanted to like it, it never worked out. For easy presentations and pitch deck I'm sure it works well.. But the people behind those tools do not seem to have the experience of working with structured lecture notes. When teaching you need many tools, such as background removal from images, easy cropping, arrows, animating the text in a predefined orde", "context": "teaches lectures", "use_case": "lecture slides", "switched_from": "Quarto", "story": "Writing a book with Quarto"}]}