from Hacker News

Google Slides Is Hilarious

by greenflag on 2/5/22, 11:44 PM with 51 comments

• by version_five on 2/6/22, 12:26 AM

  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.

• by nness on 2/6/22, 12:07 AM

  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.

• by baldeagle on 2/6/22, 2:29 AM

  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".

• by ggm on 2/6/22, 12:06 AM

  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.

• by vimy on 2/6/22, 5:03 AM

  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.

• by dmitrygr on 2/6/22, 2:42 AM

  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.

• by mguijarr on 2/6/22, 8:32 AM

  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!

• by seanp2k2 on 2/6/22, 11:08 PM

  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.

• by CAPSLOCKSSTUCK on 2/6/22, 5:51 AM

  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).

• by zestyping on 2/6/22, 5:04 AM

  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.

• by zelphirkalt on 2/6/22, 12:09 AM

  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.

• by leephillips on 2/6/22, 4:52 AM

  Entertaining, but just another “I insist on using garbage software and then complaining that it’s garbage.”

  The table at the end is oblivious to adult solutions.

  LaTeX + Beamer or Pandoc slides. Collaboration? Git.