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Alice McFlurry :bc:
Alice McFlurry :bc:
@Alice@beige.party  ·  activity timestamp 2 hours ago

My company used to be a scrappy San Francisco tech startup but we were acquired by a large corporation so we had to switch from being Google people to Microsoft people and I'm in the process of creating a training deck in PowerPoint and I am seriously losing my mind with how Microsoft keeps messing up my formatting and how every little thing seems to take 5–10 times as many steps.

For example, I'll try to figure out how to do something that would have taken one click in Google slides and I'll figure it out, but it's like a seventeen step process in PowerPoint, so, when I’m done, I'll ask my husband who has been tortured by Microsoft for much longer if there's an easier way to do that thing and he'll inevitably be like "the way you did it IS the easy way to do it in PowerPoint/Word/whatever."

It's seriously like they clunked together some code and were like "well, it's at least kind of sort of better than a word processor?" and never bothered to improve anything.

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Netraven
Netraven
@Netraven@hear-me.social replied  ·  activity timestamp 2 minutes ago

@Alice Microsoft's MO is to promote middle managers to project managers, when they have an idea like "how about we make everything worse" (simplified), what happens is microsoft promotes them to somewhere else, and then someone else comes in and has to manage that slop fest until they can say "hey, how about we eliminate this loved feature?" and boom promotion, start over. This is why they need AI cause they don't ever have an execution plan, it's just cleaning up after someone else's mess.

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mossman
mossman
@mossman@social.vivaldi.net replied  ·  activity timestamp 50 minutes ago

@Alice I rage-quit Word after it had eaten a day's work on my student thesis (and backup, somehow) for the Nth time all the way back in the late 1990s.

Sat down and taught myself LaTeX, because spending a couple of weeks learning that was still less tedious than continuing with Microsoft.

Then I took on a job translating my faculty's coursework into English - and managed to introduce the idea of not-Office to my professor and a few others.

Then I graduated and found myself in early 2000s corporate world. And died inside...

I have to say that for all its many faults and missing features, the online version of Office has managed to fix a couple of the UI quirks. And the fact some clients are using Google and LibreOffice now means that the "everyone must use Microsoft files and like it" days are over. Thank the stars!

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stx
stx
@stx@mastodon.scot replied  ·  activity timestamp 55 minutes ago

@Alice Went from a SF Biotech to a Euro chem company recently, going back to Windows was like a head wound.

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Jess wears a paperclip
Jess wears a paperclip
@halfwitamerican@beige.party replied  ·  activity timestamp 55 minutes ago

@Alice As someone who has had to swap between Slides and PowerPoint on multiple occassions (becuz bidness), I feel this in my bones.

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Suicidal Sandwich
Suicidal Sandwich
@sand@mindly.social replied  ·  activity timestamp 1 hour ago

@Alice graphic designer here. I spent the last 8yrs working in real estate marketing where everything was Microsoft. PowerPoint, Teams, SharePoint, Outlook. I found it was quicker to make presentations in Google Slides and convert them to PPTX than working in PP. Even PP on a Mac would format differently than then PP in Windows. Drove me nuts

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Alice McFlurry :bc:
Alice McFlurry :bc:
@Alice@beige.party replied  ·  activity timestamp 28 minutes ago

@sand Yeah, the problem is that I need to use the company's branding standards template, so it would be too risky to move it out of PowerPoint. Even though PowerPoint doesn't seem to care about the formatting of the brand standards within the template, anyway.

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Stacey Cornelius 🇨🇦
Stacey Cornelius 🇨🇦
@StaceyCornelius@zeroes.ca replied  ·  activity timestamp 1 hour ago

@Alice Curious what would happen (or what did happen) if you created it in Google Slides and exported it as pptx.

I can't abide PowerPoint, so I create in Keynote and export when I have to. Fortunately the layout stays pretty much intact. But I have no experience with Google Slides >> PowerPoint. Could be a gong show.

MS products are clunked to the Nth degree imho.

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Alice McFlurry :bc:
Alice McFlurry :bc:
@Alice@beige.party replied  ·  activity timestamp 28 minutes ago

@StaceyCornelius https://beige.party/@Alice/116064785287938477

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Dave Mc
Dave Mc
@guigsy@mstdn.social replied  ·  activity timestamp 1 hour ago

@Alice I've switched between Google and Microsoft a few times between different jobs. They are both awful, but I think I dislike MS more. Particularly Outlook. It's got progressively less intuitive, it can't make up its mind about whether it, or Teams, should do meetings stuff, and the search is appalling. The only good thing used to be Word (the Google word processor is incredibly basic), but now any time a colleague opens a doc in the default Word web app and munges the formatting... 🤬

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Human 3500
Human 3500
@human3500@ottawa.place replied  ·  activity timestamp 2 hours ago

@Alice Just wait for the theatrics when you move a picture one pixel in a word document! It is a life changing experience.

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Alice McFlurry :bc:
Alice McFlurry :bc:
@Alice@beige.party replied  ·  activity timestamp 1 hour ago

@human3500 Yep!

https://beige.party/@Alice/111461333326094968

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athena_rising
athena_rising
@athena_rising@beige.party replied  ·  activity timestamp 2 hours ago

@Alice *sigh* I am so sorry to find you here, but at least we are in good company. I work at a private school that shifted from Google to Office365 (so named because that's how many days of the year you will curse it), and they are constantly fussing at us to not use Google Anything anymore and to keep everything on OneDrive. AUUUUUGH! The thing is our students do not like or want to use the Office365 suite. They are all very savvy with Google and prefer it, so why should we force them to do otherwise? It interferes with them getting the work done.

I realize that when I leave this job (and that day can't come soon enough) I will probably still have to deal with MS products, but at least I won't have to be wrestling with teenagers and admin over the use of it.

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lemgandi
lemgandi
@lemgandi@mastodon.social replied  ·  activity timestamp 2 hours ago

@Alice

Meanwhile, in Open Office Impress . . .

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Scott Miller 🇺🇦 🇺🇸
Scott Miller 🇺🇦 🇺🇸
@scottmiller42@mstdn.social replied  ·  activity timestamp 2 hours ago

@Alice Oh the hours I’ve wasted in PowerPoint trying to make something look good.

A couple tips:

When you want to make a slide similar to an existing, dupe it, then make changes. It’s almost impossible otherwise.

When replacing an element that you want to be the same dimensions, keep the old element, paste the new, make same size as old (it will snap when you get close), then send to back, and delete the old element.

#PowerPointTips

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Alice McFlurry :bc:
Alice McFlurry :bc:
@Alice@beige.party replied  ·  activity timestamp 2 hours ago

@scottmiller42 At this point, I actually think I’m pretty good at PowerPoint, but that doesn't mean PowerPoint is good at listening to or remembering any of my formatting.

Like, I won’t change ANYTHING and I'll reopen the file and PowerPoint will be like "while you were away, I shifted this thing to the right which subsequently shifted everything else somewhere else, changed the font over here, made every other word fuchsia, and I also deleted something. Good luck finding it!"

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Justin 😸
Justin 😸
@onyxraven@hachyderm.io replied  ·  activity timestamp 2 hours ago

@Alice and it's not like google slides is "good" here either! yikes.

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Alice McFlurry :bc:
Alice McFlurry :bc:
@Alice@beige.party replied  ·  activity timestamp 2 hours ago

@onyxraven Apple's Pages and Keynote are my favorite, then Google, and never Microsoft.

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the elder sea
the elder sea
@eldersea@expressional.social replied  ·  activity timestamp 2 hours ago

@Alice
Monopolists be like 🤷

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GayDeceiver
GayDeceiver
@GayDeceiver@mstdn.social replied  ·  activity timestamp 2 hours ago

@Alice My heart goes out to you my fellow Googlian. I am stuck in Office 365 hell ... and I also get to administer it! [Eyeroll]

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Alice McFlurry :bc:
Alice McFlurry :bc:
@Alice@beige.party replied  ·  activity timestamp 2 hours ago

Also related to my complaints about Microsoft's janky formatting:

https://beige.party/@Alice/111461333326094968

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