One for Paul…

Just missed the Ask Paul, so I’ll post this here, for a little bit of fun.

Found this little gem reviewed in c’t magazine this morning. A mark down presentation tool for the command line:

https://github.com/visit1985/mdp

Don’t bother with PowerPoint presentations, awe your audience with a text-based markdown presentation running in the Windows command window (or Linux or macOS). Sounds like it could be fun.

Conversation 4 comments

  • hrlngrv

    Premium Member
    18 September, 2021 - 9:44 pm

    <p>I’ve spent a career despising electronic presentations. As far as I’m concerned, anything worth conveying to an audience is worth giving them in hard copy with ample white space on each page for audience members to add their own notes. If this is a better way to produce such hard copy, great.</p><p><br></p><p>Definitions can be subjective for words like <em>effective</em> and <em>sufficient</em>, but I figure for every 100 office workers who can make <em>effective</em> spreadsheets just for themselves (and that’s a small fraction of office workers who have MS Office on their work PCs), there’s at most 1 office worker who can make <em>effective</em> presentations for others. Most office workers are as capable of making effective presentations as they are writing sonnets iambic pentameter, and the tool they use to make presentations can’t turn straw into gold, just accelerate the transition of straw into compost.</p>

    • wright_is

      Premium Member
      20 September, 2021 - 4:51 am

      <p>I agree to a point. But giving a presentation to a several hundred people, it isn’t really practical to give them all a printed copy. </p><p><br></p><p>But I agree on the number of people who can produce a decent presentation, let alone one for somebody else. I spent 6 years producing presentations for my previous employer. I made the mistake of putting in some simple animations and that got me stuck producing all of the company’s presentations for the CEO through to the sale and marketing team and some key developers and project managers. This was on top of my day job.</p><p><br></p><p>In the end, I was having to take the architectural plans for new production facilities our customers were building and overlaying business processes in an interactive form on top. We’d end up with hundreds of animation sequences and hyperlinks to other places in the presentation, so the sales manager could make a virtual tour of the facility with the customer, explaining what hardware was needed and what input screens would be shown at each station on the production line, from raw material delivery, through the actual production, and out to the warehouse management system – and sometimes beyond.</p><p><br></p><p>It worked, it looked really amazing, for a PowerPoint presentation; but I kept telling them, this isn’t what a presentation tool was designed to do and they should really get an expert in to do it in a proper animation tool or with film. But I was "good enough" and a lot cheaper than getting an Alex Lindsay in to do the job properly.</p>

      • navarac

        20 September, 2021 - 8:39 am

        <p>Hardcopies are fine, however, MSFT PrinterNightmare….?</p>

      • anoldamigauser

        Premium Member
        20 September, 2021 - 8:53 am

        <p><em>"I made the mistake of putting in some simple animations and that got me stuck producing all of the company’s presentations for the CEO through to the sale and marketing team and some key developers and project managers."</em></p><p><br></p><p>No good deed goes unpunished.</p>

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